Juanxer

These last years have been pretty interesting, the way the 3D industry players have decided to share code when it makes sense to them, benefitting all.

Pixar’s encouraging performance – by giving away the good stuff I wonder if this would be conducive to EIAS ever providing Encage-like functionality out of the box.

Not as severe as that one but the usual little things near the end of a render batch, such as failing to stitch or crashing.

It seems I've found a consistent way to crash Renderama or generally make it fail. We have an hexacore Mac Pro beast, and I've never ever managed to leave a batch of Renderama jobs overnight without seeing it having crashed just after leaving, no jobs done. It drives me nuts. It's driving me nuts right now. Okay. When we leave the office, we shut down power to everything but the CPUs, which means: - The ADSL modem/router gets loses power. - Ditto for my dual monitor setup. Now, here there is a fancy thing: it seems this generation of Mac Pro towers, upon detecting that a secondary screen has been shut down somehow improperly, it moves all windows in that screen to the main one (which isn't such a bad idea, but it isn't quite a good one, either. It ought to be a System Preferences -> Screens button thing. Oh, well…). This always happens when I cut power while the screen is switched on, while it doesn't seem to do so if I switch the monitor off turning it to sleep mode). So, questions: -Is the Renderama system (master and slave apps) aversely sensitive to, say, the local network and the Internet disappearing under the Mac Pro's feet, even if all slaves are inside the machine? -Is it aversely sensitive to having OS X move its windows from one monitor to another without user intervention?

A beautiful one: Kara (making of and some context: Introducing Quantic Dream's Kara)

I hope you release the new version really soon. I've just gone through FIVE re-renders because of Renderama systematically crashing upon reaching the last volley of frames, if not failing to fully stitch them, etc. Of course, yesterday at the very least it remembered where things were after the crash and managed to finish the last tasks after relaunching. Today it won't, no rhyme no reason, no matter the usual slave folder voodoo. Oh, look, now the sixth one went without a hitch, what's the deal? I've got an SSD'd hexacore Mac Pro, and all gains in speed are offset by the constant losses in re-render times. I simply can't risk letting this beast of a machine doing renders overnight: the fastest the task (say, rendering a few grayscale masks) the bigger the risk of a crash, it looks like. My trusty Mac Pro 2006 at home seems to prove that slower is better Renderama-wise. This is not a bug report. You've got quite a lot of those already, Having into account that you don't seem to be addressing them at all, we need something far, far better than a "real soon now" and a somewhat smug smile. I must launch an occlusion pass now. Will it work?

Something I'd wish is the EIAS team to ape Adobe After Effects' UI conventions—and a few Photoshop ones—as far as possible. For example, Photoshop's path edit keyboard shortcuts are the nicest ones.

I think that's the same bug that I reported here some time ago: http://www.eias3d.com/forums/tracker/issues.php?issue=38

I think that's the same bug that I reported here some time ago: http://www.eias3d.com/forums/tracker/issues.php?issue=38

I'm trying to find a features comparison chart between ViaCAD 2D/3D and ViaCAD Pro. I sort of remember 2D/3D lacking a few modeling features EIM had, Pro covering them all (and adding a few fancy ones like continuity-capping and things?), although I'm not certain. I downloaded the ViaCAD V.7 demo, and I am having trouble with its 2D drawing: everything I try to draw gets offset, curves only show their control lines, etc. I'm searching for a downloadable demo of ViaCAD 2D/3D V.8 to see if that happens, too. My old V.6 works OK, though. My card is a Radeon HD 5770. Anybody seeing the same?

I realize this comes a bit too late, EIAS 9 being in in its last stage of development, but… Now that supposedly we are about to get a revamped model import system, I'd urge you EIAS dev gods to test it against the most useful and typical model sources, such as Poser/DazStudio's, 3DSMax, Maya, LW, etc., and provide some guidance on what settings work best (both in exporting from those apps and importing in EIAS). I see the Poser/DAZ case as most important, as it is the easiest way to obtain characters models to work with. If something deserves a "magic button", importing Poser-originated models does. Obviously, the textures and UV issues are the main thing there. Will this new system produce readily textured models upon import, or will it require to fiddle with things? Is the single UV per object problem still there? Etc.

Oftentimes Quicktime-based apps can work with Quicktime Reference-type movies derived from .IMGs: instead of transcoding the .IMG movie into a standalone .MOV file, you save a lightweight reference .MOV which only contains the Quicktime-friendly track data and pointers to the original .IMG. You could try that for Motion. (You'll need to install the Electricimage Quicktime component, in any case)

EIM won't run on OS X Lion at all, as Lion lacks the Rosetta PPC emulator. I wonder if the PC version could run decently on any virtualizer such as Parallels, VMware or VirtualBox.

Richard, thank you for your sample project. Even if I finally did mine by aligning the textures manually (there wasn't so many puzzle pieces), I still wanted to know how to solve this for future reference. Certainly, yours animates correctly in my EIAS setup. I'll study it to see what I was doing wrong. Also, thank you Gyro for the linkie. :)

Squeeee! :D Let's take a look. Thank you!

OK, playing with CreateUV: I get to map the texture across the puzzle pieces correctly. What I don't quite get is what I must do for the pieces to retain their bit of texture in place so that I can animate them around (I'm afraid the plugin instructions are a bit too spartan). I see an export-reimport is recommended, but still I don't know what I am doing or why, and so I'm lost :-/. (Sorry to be so dense, but I have managed to avoid working with UVs in EIAS until now, so this is fairly foreign to me)

That's the issue: that copy-paste trick doesn't seem to be working for me unless I set the map to World Coordinate. I get different results if I paste on the ball instead of on the Project Window item, none of them correct. :huh: (I'll try that plugin and see what happens. Thanks)

I think this was covered in some other thread but I can't seem to find it, so… I am building a puzzle of an Euro banknote. In order to texture the puzzle pieces, I've created an UberShape with its size equal to the assembled puzzle, mapped the Euro texture onto it in World Coordinate mode, and pasted it to the puzzle pieces following Ian's procedure here. Now, I'd need to turn the pieces's maps from World Coordinate mode to local so that the texture stays in place while the pieces fly around. I think there was some kind of export-reimport trick for that. Could anyone lend me a hand? :)

Actually, you can have more Slaves than available cores in older non-hyperthreading Macs and gain this extra bit of speed in some cases, too, as if the Cameras weren't able to fully saturate the cores while in a 1:1 relationship.

I wonder about those new Mac Pros. It seems it's not clear yet what sort of Xeon-class processors Intel will derive from the Sandy Bridge family. My guess is we won't see anything new until next year (unless Intel refreshes the current hexacores with speedier ones and Apple uses them in all its range, dropping the quad/octocores).

A very important feature in Zaxwerks' apps and plugins is the ability to set some level of figure contraction in the imported vector profiles to compensate for the expansion that the beveling features introduce. I don't know of any other tool able to do that.

OS X 10.6.x can run 32 and 64 bit apps at once no matter if one has started it up in 32 or 64 bit kernel mode. The only potential problem would be getting 64 bit drivers for the USB key, I think. Starting up in 64bit kernel mode is required when using more than 16 GB of RAM, I seem to remember. I use one or more cameras than cores my Mac has even if it has no multithreaded processors (too old). I've found it gets me a bit of an extra gain. An hyperthreaded system ought to give a decently noticeable extra benefit (20-30%, I've read somewhere).

I've been tearing my hair out for a few days trying to solve a few repeating frames here and there in an After Effects CS5 composition containing EIAS-originated footage, rerendering things a few times until I began to suspect AE and checked a few things there. It seems to be AE CS5's fault: it has problems interpreting footage's FPS (not just EIAS' but a few Quicktime movies, too): it labeled 25fps .IMGs as 26.087fps :-/, and making it conform to 25fps produced repeated frames. I had to convert those .IMG animations to .MOV files via AE CS3 for AE CS5 to get them right. (Has there been any recent change in the way EIAS renders animations that could be making AE CS5 confuse things?)

There are some Mac emulators for Windows and Intel Macs that run Classic Mac OS. I'll have to investigate that a bit, see if they are an easy fit. Have anyone tried EIM for Windows in Parallels or VMware?

Arrgh, you teaser you! :P