Juanxer

I'd be interested in knowing how this Camera will behave regarding reading and writing scene and temp files while rendering. At my job we have just bought an hexacore Mac Pro to replace our old G5, fitted with a RAID 0 set of two SSDs (plus a RAID 0 of three hard drives. Overspecced, I know, but we plan to keep it for some five years or so): being in the middle of a job, the thing is still half-configured, but we tried an After Effects comp of several IMGs and RPFs which went from eleven minutes in our old G5 to just 36 seconds!!! Camera ought to fly on SSDs. I plan to try a few old EIAS projects on it to see how it goes (wasn't there some benchmark project around?).

I remember discussing the mousewheel support issue in the other EIAS forums time ago. There was a bit of conflict in deciding the extent of its support and deciding its behavior for every Animator viewport and things. At the very least, would you be able to support mousewheel scrolling in the Project window? I've just done some animation work this past weekend, and even if my Project window's item list was hardly two screenheights long, not being able to mousewheel it up or down was really frustrating.

This is a bit of a lazy thing, but… Given that both OS X and Windows 7 provide with a search field in their open file dialogs, it would be nice to turn the "Locate texture file "XXXX.XXX" text field into a button that pastes the filename into the search field. I've found out that using Spotlight/Windows Search to locate a missing element is quite faster than trying to remember where it was and navigating up to there. As one can't highlight and copy the text in that upper text field, one has to manually type it. Having such button would be very convenient. As I said, it's a bit of a lazy thing :)

I am afraid EIM is unable to deal with polygon-based models: FACTs are only allowed in a project as reference objects. Could you post a screen capture of that mesh showing the problem?

Sorry to put this in this forum: it's just that several of us are ViaCAD users: Punch Software announced a one-day-only 60% discount on ViaCAD 2D/3D v.7's price. Funnily enough, it is slightly cheaper than the upgrade price for going from v.6 to v.7, so… http://www.punchcad.com/products/viacad2d3dV7-oneday.htm?utm_source=punch_list&utm_medium=email&utm_content=img_buynow&utm_campaign=onedaysale_092810

Mmm, I've tried it, and I've got this: -Use the "3D Channel Extract" filter on the RPF. -Select the "Unclamped RGB" channel. -Play with the Black Point and White Point values around their midpoints near each other and you get the image back. Now, I don't quite know how this is supposed to work and what use it is as implemented, really. Anyone?

If I do understand things right, the problem keeps being that GPU-based acceleration is renderer features-limited.

Yes, you do. Also, you could test setting up more Cameras than cores available, too, as they support hyperthreading: each core shows as if there were two of them, getting about 110-130% practical extra performance. EIAS 9 probably will make Camera-setting tasks for single PCs and Macs a thing of the past, as it seems it will be a multiprocessing app.

Here there are a couple of analyses of the new towers. They are a bit preliminary, but fairly revealing. http://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-MacProWestmere.html (a fairly long one, rather Photoshop and friends-oriented but quite interesting) http://www.barefeats.com/wst10.html (www.barefeats.com has several tests of the new Radeons, too) Midrange, the hexacore Westmere seems quite balanced and overall better than an octocore, but one wonders if EIAS would be one of the few apps that would get better results with an octocore. As per the first review, it seems the new range of Macs makes all too easy to get it wrong and buy a not quite cost-effective model: one has to match app usage with Mac model more carefully than usual. At my job we'll probably get a hexacore to replace our old G5 tower (we do a bit of everything on it: DTP, DTV, 3D, radio ads, etc.). We'll get some OWC-brand SSDs for the OS and apps' temp files, too.

This comes from EIAS3D' honorable opposition :) but I think it is quite revealing: Brad Peebler from Luxology (Modo) talks about doing some testing rendering via GPU cards trying to attain those mythical x10 speeds one often hears about. Sadly, it's not there yet at all: one has to discard many rendering features the GPU is not capable of. So CPUs it is. See: GPU vs CPU Rendering Talk by Luxology it's sad that Intel abandoned the Larrabee project, which would have been the closest thing to solving this industry's needs. One hopes some upcoming CPU+GPU-in-a-core processors become interesting products (if the GPU shares memory with the CPU, you can use the GPU sort of like a super-SSD vectorial unit for partial calculations without the data transfer time penalties involved in moving things berween memory and the graphics card's). Anyway, the main thing is that no CUDA or OpenCL is going to be of much help in our field for rather a while.

I usually export .3DSs from Hexagon, as both Hex and EIAS process them quite fast. DAZ3D seems to have abandoned further development: there was some announcement of them doing a new debug pass and a Universal Binary for Mac last year, but since then it's been total radio silence. A terrible shame: Hexagon was very user-friendly and fairly capable. I've been following some Modo videotutorials this August and, compared to Hexagon, it's like pulling teeth :(.

In Vimeo and Youtube's case, all uploaded movies are FLVs (Flash video, for low resolution versions) or MP4s. Quicktime caches movies by itself, so there is no browser cache file easy to extract, I think. Possibly there is some utility able to detect the movie addressed in the webpageand download it by itself.

There are ways to do it, often via browser addons that let you select the movie element and save it. There are several of those for Firefox. In Apple's Safari, you can locate the movie via the Activity window (it's quite noticeable while loading) and Alt-Click on it to save it to disk. EDIT: aw, I was thinking Vimeo or Youtube, sorry. Mark's web hosts them as Quicktime movies, and the QT player allows for saving the files.

OS X' Quick Look does show them, too: select the item in the Finder and press Space (I think it does so via the EIAS Quicktime codec).

I'm spending my holidays trying hard to learn Modo. It IS powerful but oh boy what an ugly mess its UI is. (I wonder if Luxology will consider adding parametric surface modeling to Modo, further down the road: the seeds are there)

The only way would be for you to switch the file dialog to Column View, having preview column active (I think you must set that so via Finder windows' view options for them to be active in file dialogs too). I'm in Snow Leopard and it shows .IMG previews faultlessly. I dislike OS X' Column View as implemented, though :( (I'd rather it previewed things in a separate pane in the dialog window, old-style). Not exactly a trick (it costs a bit of money): if you purchase Default Folder X, a truly brilliant Open/Save file dialog helper, it adds to file dialogs a preview pane that understands IMGs, resizable. (Default Folder X is a lifesaver. You can download a demo)

Perhaps making EIAS compatible with the popular Growl notification system would be even more useful (even if mainly visual, Growl allows for setting up distinct alarm sounds per application). Growl for OS X: http://growl.info/ Growl for Windows: http://www.growlforwindows.com/

It seems Alembic stores baked animated scene data instead of high level-editable data as FBX and COLLADA would do. Looks like being a way to drop others' animated elements into one's scenes without a fuss, or a way to accept their completed scenes and send them to one's renderer without needing any conversion process. I wonder how editable that imported data is, once in one's app. They probably are abstracting shaders, too, although I can find no reference to that. I have found the project site, here: http://www.alembic.io/

I don't know if this would help, but ypu could try setting the partition to ignore permissions via the checkbox at the bottom of the Information panel (select the Volume, CMD-I).

The only thing I find a bit confusing is those two logos: I guess one is the company's one and the other is the app's. Being the names nearly identical, perhaps the Logos page would need some info clarifying their usage. That butterfly sure will need to be emphasized around to mark them apart. (I've just noticed a couple of non-loading images here: http://www.eias3d.com/products/eias-camera/ ) Will you spread the word about the new site? Myself I'll mention it around :)

I like the new site A LOT! It exudes excitement and optimism. (Is that blue box at the bottom of the front page some sort of new packaging for the Eias dvd? It looks really neat)

Are isometric and front/top/right/etc. renderings very difficult to implement? They are rather too useful to ignore (I know one can render the non-perspective views, but they lack practical parameters input such as size and clipping plane position).

A great tool for conversions to/from Quicktime and other formats is freeware MPEG Streamclip. The author, who is a hero of mine (he produced OS X drivers for the oldie MiroMotion videocards, with uncompressed video abilities!!!), takes extra care to correct Quicktime's colourspace antics. Quicktime Pro, per se, only activates those extra exporting and editing features in Quicktime Player (which probably implies there are some royalty issues involved in that). Quicktime's transcoding abilities, as such, are available to any app that wants to take advantage of it without needing to upgrade to Pro. That said, it isn't that expensive.

If you anticipate using many hard drives, an alternative to external HD cases is a drive dock. There are several brands and models, some of those with FW interfaces. Myself, I got a double bay drive dock to be able to copy material between them (I bought an USB3 model for futureproofing: faster than SATA. Here I am waiting for silly Apple to add OS support for the dozen or so USB3 interface cards floating around in PC land).

Thank you all for your advice :) Definitely this was a combination of not enough antialias, bad comping practices and working in PAL. Those re-renders solved nearly 90% of the jaggies. There are some that seem incurable, so I think I'll isolate and filter them with some masks. And now I've found out that I need to provide anamorphic PAL (for 16:9 results). I was thinking about setting a pixel ratio of 1.78 or so (what is the precise value for that in EIAS?), but my brain was hurting and I have enough time left to try thingso, so I will render as 1024x576 and let AE or FCPro squash it. It should be interesting, although I suspect antialias would work best when rendered at the final resolution (which I'll try too): when EIAS antialiases things while in a non-1:1 pixel ratio rendering situation, is AA also non-1:1 or is that an independent thing, and a border is a border is a border? Aw, that's what happens when one does a couple or three TV ads a year at most in a small ad agency. My country goes DTTV: instant rustiness. :D