David Sander

I am doing feature VFX work, which requires architectural, plus space ships, monsters, ghosts, set extensions, you name it. I have been using EI for 16 years (!!!!!!), and am still learning things. I recently invested in ZBrush and FormZ for my modelling, and while I consider myself a novice at modelling, I have determined a solid workflow between my modellers and EI to create some very interesting material indeed. Decisions about which platform, which program to use etc boils down to personal taste, combined with getting the right tool for the right job.

Ah I see. It relates back to "teaching" FormZ what type of mapping to apply to particular models before exporting. Understood, and much appreciated. Yes, I'm using 7.0.2. It has an entirely dysfunctional idea of what a FACT file is, so I'm using OBJ as my export format (keeping in mind to use facetted model type only, as parametric exporting results in no geometry and a crapload of effectors once imported into EIAS). I've been using it for a little bit now, and while I have issues with some of its interface (and the vulnerability of certain processes to result in corrupted geometry very quickly), it is robust enough to handle most of my needs. The results in EIAS are pretty damn good, too.

Hi folks, I'm cranking out some models using FormZ at the moment, but am finding EIAS unable to use UV space with some models. I understand FormZ itself decides what form of mapping it thinks each model warrants, but I don't know if that information comes through via OBJ or FACT exports. Either way, a simple revolved profile (e.g. the casing of an antique compass) is coming into EIAS, but the Info > Shading > Texture > Use UV Space is greyed out. FormZ's manual is as labyrinthine as it is unhelpful, and I'm not seeing anything in any of the export dialogue out of FormZ to determine texturing specifications, including telling the model it can be UV mapped. Even the texturemapping within FormZ lacks a "UV button" anywhere (not that I am texturing in FormZ, I am only using it for modelling, and having EIAS do the rest). If I have a texturemap of flecked antique metal, I want that to be undistorted no matter where on the surface of the model it features, which rules out basic cylindrical, spherical or flat mapping. UV mapping would be ideal, but it's not happening with a greyed out UV button in EIAS. Anyone had this experience before and can steer me to the magic section within FormZ or otherwise that can help? David

In experimenting a little, I've found changing the Uber Shape to an appropriately sized cube with a very small Z value (instead of being a plane), has worked, and I have blank page backs after positioning the texturemap at the very centre of the cube and have Negative-Z unchecked. In future I'll give that a try to see if I can make double-sided pages of a book with one object. Hmmm... David

I've got a simple scene involving a dozen basic geometric shapes, and I'm lighting the scene wholly using Global Illumination. On rendering a full res snapshot, the Calculating GI Buffer phase in Camera suddenly goes extremely slowly, and in my Mac's Activity Monitor utility, I'm seeing CPU usage maxed out. A basic scene with 604,000 polys, no lights and small textures isn't something I'm expecting to take five minutes per HD frame to render on a machine with 32Gb RAM and 2 x 2.93GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon processors - not when I was able to render a scene earlier today with frames taking less than 30 seconds to crank out. This is the first time I've encountered something like this. In the GI controls I have set secondary rays to zero and slightly decreased the ray count to 180 in the hope this would help, but so far nothing has changed. I'm using Sky Color instead of a skymap. Not sure what else to tweak in order to bring this monster render time down to a dull roar. Any suggestions welcome. David

It's the old Negative-Z problem again, something I scarcely need to use, and when I do need it to work, it steadfastly refuses to play ball - I think... I've been asked to model a desk calendar with pages tearing off. I've used Uber Shape plane for my pages, and bezier deformation to curl the pages as they flip over and tear off. The artwork on each page I have applied as a planar map, with Negative-Z unchecked so when each page flips, the reverse side is blank. Nice theory, but no matter what I do regarding positioning in the Z-axis of the texturemap, I'm always seeing the texturemap in reverse on the back side of each page. I've done the flipping pages of a book before and had the same problem, solved by a separate render pass featuring all blank pages and then a separate render pass on top of that creating a luma-matte of the page faces I wanted to keep blank, all for later compositing in AE, but surely there's an easier way. Or have I misinterpreted what Negative-Z is supposed to be doing?

I have a large scene (over 6 million polys, rendering out at 3000 x 1276), rendering just geometry (no textures or shaders) under GI skymap and one raytrace-shadowed parallel light (for sunlight). A full-res test render out of EIAS took 17 minutes. However running the animation through Renderama, my frames are now taking an hour each, and there's 825 of them. I have 11 rendering cores at my disposal (across 2 machines), so it's not desperately bad time-wise, but I'm curious as to why the difference from 17 minutes to an hour. Camera settings are as follows: Hardware info: Memory 32768 Processors: 16 Current Settings Architecture 32bits Use Memory, Mb: 2000 Run Threads: 16 Is this right? Or should I have it set to something different? David

Just bought the upgrade, can't wait to install and play! Thank you so much Tomas and the team! You guys RAWK!!!

Determined a compromise on this, creating a two-pass pre-comp for a luminance pass. The first pass relied on a simple Global Illumination white sky colour to create a general shadow effect; and then rendering a second pass in Phong shading of a buffer shadow pass for shadows being cast from a specific light source (in this case the sun). As the scene is supposed to be misty early morning light, I've adjusted and softened the transparency of the buffer shadow accordingly in my After Effects comp. I had originally achieved the same effect with a single pass using a skymap and applying that as a GI light source, but on animating, its shadows shimmered and buzzed, regardless of anti-aliasing settings and blurs applied to the texturemap. Here's hoping EIAS 9 allows the burning in of a GI map onto a scene!

That's great! Thank you! I'm still struggling with the buzzing/shimmering shadows issue (my current tests are without trees entirely), but it appears that might be resolved with an upgrade to 9 (whenever that might be possible).

Okay, I've been through this a few times now, altering the settings as advised above and so on, then re-rendering and testing (pushing my renders up from 6 minutes a frame to 55 minutes a frame in the process). I pared back the project to render just a luminance pass, which would incorporate the shadows etc and leave textures and so on to other render passes (likely in Phong, as there's no need to raytrace textures). However, even in just a luminance pass, with no textures (except the GI map), transparencies, specular, transmission or anything else, just geometry, I'm still getting shimmering shadows. This is frustrating the hell out of me, and now I'm looking to have to render the cast shows as a texturemap and apply that via a projection camera as another texture, because I can't bake the shadowmap into the scene. from a practical perspective the shadows need to be calculated just the once - there's nothing moving in the scene except the camera. Even with multiple processors, 55 minutes per frame on a 60 second shot is a real time-hit, and I've already lost a week troubleshooting shimmering shadows. Has anyone additional wisdom they can impart here? David

Hey all, I have been building landscapes in EI for a feature I'm working on. One shot calls for a landscape soft-lit, as if by sunlight though medium to heavy clouds. I struck on the idea of making up an HDRI image and just using Global Illumination to light the scene, no lights at all. After a few practise runs to make sure my geometry was all looking okay, and dealing with a pesky anti-aliasing issue, I thought I had it done. The landscape does not move. The camera flies over the top of it. That is all. After a lengthy overnight render, I find there are areas that are buzzing or shimmering, as if I have noise turned up to 11. I have high polygon-count trees in the scene, and it looks like they're covered in ants. Add to that there's an odd strobing effect with shadows being cast, like a moire pattern. I haven't varied my skymap resolution yet (1000 x 500 pixels), that is my next thought, but other than that I'm wondering if there's some solution that's not going to result in a week-long render. Can I "bake" the scene with that light? Is there some simpler solution? David

It's winter-coming-onto-spring here in Sydney, and I've been hunkered down, slaving away over a hot computer :blush: I sent this link to Tomas for the EIAS website gallery, but here it is again: http://vimeo.com/44426114 plus I've just added this demo reel covering behind the scenes on the same project: http://vimeo.com/46992136 David

By the sounds of things I may be better off investing in different packages to address different modelling responsibilities. First of all I probably need to be a bit more specific in the jobs I do. My VFX work covers a wide variety of topics, from logos and 3D type through to vehicles (aircraft, trains, cars, spacecraft, war), architecture, terrain, and on occasion a human figure or animal, chiefly for motion pictures, but also for television or web content. I have little experience or desire to get into character design or animation, so if - for example - I need to populate a scene with 3D people I would like to call on mocap data applied to a model (not that I have done this yet but hope, should the need arise, EIAS would be up to the job). I don't mind the idea of investing money in an app if it's going to do a job and do it well. What concerns me with any new app is the time it takes to get into it, understand its nuances and overall design, and get it to integrate with my infrastructure. I looked at Blender and from the outset it baffled me. A colleague of mine said he wasn't surprised, as it had been designed from the ground up with little consideration of existing 3D apps. Given time to unlearn all I know I might stand a chance to learn Blender properly, but there's that crucial element - time. Perhaps I've dwelt amongst the Adobe and EI family for too long (Photoshop since 1.0 in 1990 for crying out loud) and can't adapt my interface expectations well enough to be anything but a clutz amongst any app that doesn't adhere to the basic principals that Adobe and EI apps adhere to. At this time I don't know. I do recall struggling for a long time with FormZ when I was using it in the late 1990s, but then it's possible it has evolved (and I have evolved) where we could get along. MOI appears to have an interface and overall structure that I imagine I'd get into quite quickly, but it really does also appear to be fairly limited compared to some other apps. Modo sounds really good, so it has taken a step up in my considerations list, and ZBrush remains quite high as well. Inasmuch as I'd love to wait until EIAS9 is released (and what do you keep hinting at, Tomas???) I have to model a 1916 Belgian Great War battlefield (complete with shell craters, trenches, sandbags, smashed artillery, dead horses, broken wagons, barbed wire, shattered trees and various mutilated body parts), and I'm currently at a loss as to what modeller would prove best. Given the diversity of objects to be built, I'm concerned one modeller wouldn't be able to handle all the different types of objects (except maybe for Modo, ZBrush or perhaps even Sculptris). The model and ensuing texturemaps have to be very high fidelity, as the finished result is a shot flying over the battlefield, slowly moving in on one section, all ending up as 4k cinema footage. The film makers have already shot live action plates of soldiers to be matted in, so there's a lot at stake. Until EIAS9 is released, I'll need to retain the G5 in order to keep Transporter running, as it's not working under Lion and I'd have no way to convert OBJs or anything else to FACT files. In the short term I will probably continue using EIM for much of what I need to model, but there are certainly things (e.g. the muddy battlefield itself) that concern me enough to believe EIM wouldn't be able to handle it. One can do only so much with displacement maps applied to a shape modelled using UberNurbs. It's likeliest my own fault. I don't claim to be anywhere near the world's greatest 3D modeller - far from it - and EIM could possibly be the answer, but knowing my luck if I push and prod far enough to get halfway decent models, I get geometry errors or some illegal function or some corruption or somesuch and it all goes pear-shaped and EIM crashes and I have to start again (EIM has more often than not been one of the less stable apps I have, but then I do push quite hard). Modelling in EIM is for me has almost always been a process of patience, lateral thinking and a great many swear words. Any more experienced suggestions, opinions and arguments would be very welcome.

Hi all, Thanks for everyone's feedback - sounds like good advice, and I will certainly investigate the various recommendations. Another app I've seen around for a while but never delved into investigating is ZBrush. While it's clearly designed for organic bodies coming as it does from a clay sculpting technique, there appears to be a few examples in its impressive galleries of solid body subjects, such as armour and even a building. While I've read it deals with direct-to-surface texturemapping, I'm guessing that level of info wouldn't translate between it and EIAS and texturemapping is possibly best left to EIAS (I could be wrong in that with their "GoZ" utility - is there an opening for EIAS to be included in their integration list?). Is anybody around who has used ZBrush with EIAS and can convey their impressions? Are there any pitfalls, dangers or incompatibilities with this combination? I understand ZBrush exports OBJs, so with EIAS9 this might work really well. Thoughts? Tomas, words can barely express how much I am anticipating EIAS9! My own user-feedback "list of suggestions" based on using 8 will wait until I've seen how well 9 stacks up ;) David

I've been doing a bit of research of late, looking to revise and streamline my EIAS workflow. I have been increasingly involved in VFX for feature work, and am a bit concerned my current workflow isn't capable enough to deal with some of the projects that have been flagged by clients. For creation of models, my current setup has been relying on the antiquated, yet still functional, ElectricImage Modeller. I have been running this on an older PPC G5 Mac. EIAS Animator and Camera run on a shiny new Intel MacPro tower running under OS-X Lion (which can't run older apps such as EIM). Given a lot of my work was such where the need for modelling was never great, finding an alternative for EIM was never a high priority - it worked, it imported EPS files for conversion to 3D logos etc, and it exported FACT files for EIAS. It wasn't broken, so there wasn't any need to fix it. Neat! Recently however there has been an increasing need to address 3D modelling that's more than simple logos. Now I'm being asked to recreate a Great War battlefield c.1916, or a contoured and detailed map for an adventure documentary, or a train or a spaceship or a car. A few weeks ago the G5 suffered a power supply failure (complete with "pop" and thin stream of evil-smelling smoke). I managed to replace the power supply thanks to a seller on eBay, so the machine's lifespan has been extended, but it's obvious I need to move on from the G5 and hence EIM (given it appears it's never coming back) to something that functions well and integrates with the EI pipeline. I'm loathe to move to a different animator/renderer - I've been using EI for 15 years now and have been delighted with the results - so it's about finding something that works well, has the sort of tool range (or better) EIM had, and doesn't require re-learning entire workflows and interfaces, or costing vast wads of cash to make it compatible with EIAS. I've had a look at Moi3D, which certainly appears friendly and straightforward. I'm wondering though what's required to take what it creates and make it compatible with EIAS, since I can't see any reference to FACT files. I'm also wondering where the tool might be that is similar to EIM's UberNurbs. Aside from lofting a number of profiles, I'm wondering how one might quickly create the shape of - say - a cushion or pillow (or sandbag for my Great War project). Is Moi3D limited in that way? Or am I not seeing the toolset for that? Before EIM came along I was using FormZ - is perhaps that the recommended alternative? Something else? Is there an application that folks recommend that works well as a modeller under OSX Lion (and beyond), and can provide files to EIAS with as little drama as possible? What packages are people using that they love using? I'm not doing biological modelling - not characters or otherwise. Most of my modelling revolves around logos, along with planes, trains and automobiles, but I can't rule out doing beasties and the like in the future. Any suggestions of which path to take would be greatly appreciated. David

Any chance of a run-down comparison between EIM and Moi3D? Pros and Cons? I'm going to download the trial, but even so is there anything I should be looking out for?

I bought this dongle when I bought EI, which would have been in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Certainly more than 10 years ago. It's purple, and its little light doesn't work any more. Sounds like I may need to buy a replacement DUO dongle. Dammit. David

I have no idea. How do I tell?

Installed all the Sentinel plug-ins and patches etc as covered above, but "Hardware key error: Key not plugged in #3" message still pops up even after I've gone through everything. I installed the EIAS 8.0 app but the Universal Dongle app couldn't be fired up on this machine (I've since installed the Lion version, too). I'd like to port EIAS across to my MacPro as the good old G5 is being put out to pasture, but without being able to get EIAS working I'm being held back. I've checked via Terminal and yes, com.Safenet.driver.Sentinel is present and running, and I had no errors or funnies during any of the installations. MacPro 2 x 2.93 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 32Gb 1066 MHz DDR3 running Mac OSX 10.7.3, booting in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes to se if there's any difference (none). Thoughts?

Thank you for that. RealFlow looks amazing, but for a price tag of $4k I'll just use a bottle of coloured water against a backlit white cyc shot with my Canon 5D (the client just isn't paying enough to justify that expense). I have Trapcode Particular, so I can certainly add some additional drops and stuff where necessary, but I felt it wasn't up to the challenge (whereas RealFlow would certainly be). Thanks so much for the heads-up though, there's some beautiful looking clips on YouTube featuring work done using RealFlow. David

Hi Tom, All the sequences are shot in real time, which is a mercy. I haven't got Realflow and can't actually find where to download it on the NorthernLights website. David

I've used EI since 1997, but I don't use it full time. I am a VFX artist for films and TV, and use Adobe After Effects as my primary tool. I use EI whenever I need to do 3D, and for the most part it performs admirably. I've had a look through this forum, and as it's 3am my brain's probably not coming up with the right search terms, so I figured I should ask, as in all my time I have never had to think about this particular detail of a job. I have a film sequence with a guy slashing at enemies with a sword. The director wants splashes of blood to fly out of the wounds as they're inflicted (effectively a "splatter" effect - during the shoot they opted to not have blood-pack squibs). I have already experimented with an unlit water bottle full of paint shot against a lit white backdrop (so I can extract a luma-key). My next thought is to try some 3D, but neither Psunami or the various blob tools really seem appropriate to create the effect of a fluid flying through the air. I've never managed to master Dante enough for this sort of exercise, and Dante's not really designed to deal with viscosity controls and breaking up of larger blobs into smaller ones. I've seen very nice fluids clips on iStockPhoto created in Maya or Max or possibly even Blender, my enquiry is if anyone has a sure-fire way to create cool moving fluid effects in EI that I could use to create gushing blood/gore from wounds in 3D?

Hi Tom, A non-disclosure agreement prevents me from sending the actual project, but when I have a project that presents the problem I'll be sure to send it through. Thanks! David Thanks - much appreciated. Yeah, it really does look like that's the best option (or converting IMAGE to DPX or TGA via GraphicConvert), rather than trusting Renderama to stitch properly. Are there any plans to work out a way to enable IMAGE files to exceed 2Gb? I'm doing cinema work at the moment and it's not hard to create sequences that are bigger than 2Gb... David

I've encountered what may be little bit of a bug with Renderama and I'm wondering if there's a way to address it or if it's something outside user control. I'm rendering multiple passes for animations running at 25fps, some of which exceed the malignant 2Gb limit and must be brought in as frame sequences (after tediously converting from image files to TGA as After Effects will not recognise EI frame sequences), others stitch to a single .img file. When the stitched final .img file is brought into After Effects Pro (CS5), the frame rate is interpreted as 26.087fps, which is ... unexpected. When I scrub through the animation, I am finding what could be considered duplicate frames. If I adjust the frame rate to 25fps in AEP, the duplicate frames crop up elsewhere in the timeline, which adds a regular 'tic' to otherwise smooth motion. The duration of the clip when first brought in is correct, so adjusting the frame rate causes separate passes to slip out of sync because of consequent alteration to duration (when you decrease the frame rate, the length of the clip increases). In one other job, there even appears to be frames that have been stitched out of order. These problems have now cropped up in three separate jobs, which is beginning to become a problem. Are these problems something I should be thinking are coming from Renderama's stitching process, or is there something else potentially awry? Animating/Renderama EIAS 8.0.0 on Apple Mac Dual 2.5GHz PowerPC G5, OSX 10.4.11, 4Gb RAM Rendering on Apple Mac Pro 2 x 2.93GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon, OSX 10.6.6, 32Gb RAM, with 7 renderers (using 7 of the 8 processors available).