Aziz

Wow Joe. Looks great! All in EIAS? No After Effects either? One of these days, please do a "how to" write-up.

It depends on what kind of water to be created. For droplets - Mr Blobby would be the way to go. I'm guessing you'd like to do a surface water effect. Firstly, you'll need a well meshed plane. The best way to do this is with the Ubershape plug-in and reimport it into EIAS. (This way you avoid having the plug-in taking rendering resources during final render). Then apply the Runwave deformation to it. Set Amplitude to a high number, e.g. 40. Then set deform along Y-axis. For soft looking waves, in the Runwave options, set the Noise Options to a small number, e.g. 4. Make sure the green animation arrow is activated in your project window. Now drag the time marker to the end time of your animation, e.g. 10 seconds. View the deformation boundary lines (usually red/pink) in the Top Window View. Drag it a small distance away. This will set a new keyframe for the Runwave deformation motion. The other key element of water is texture. Set a watery colour for the water plane. Then push the diffuse setting arrow to Darker. Set the Reflection setting for the plane. Choose a nice sky or abstract image for the water to reflect. I've attached a small sample project called waterwave.zip. In it I've added the LW_Ripples shader to the diffuse layer for added effect. Unfortunately, I failed to follow my own advice and the plane is an active Ubershape plane ;-) waterwave.zip

I used Infini-D prior to EIAS. Liked it very much. The particle engine was great for its time. And I find doing 3D fonts with it easier, i.e. a more visual experience, than in EIAS. Would have loved to see it integrated into EI rather than MetaTools' Carrara. Too much of Infini-D's spirit was lost when it was merged into Carrara. Oh well, time marches on :-)

Thanks for the tutorial Diego.

Hi, I guess you're referring to EI Modeler. I'm no expert but when I have trouble with the sweep tool, I double click the sweep icon and a dialog box with options appears. I change settings in the dialog box until my sweep works. Not very precise, but it works for me :)

Please excuse me if I can't explain the topic well, I'm still trying to get my head around it. To quote from www.deepimg.com, a 'Deep Image' involves "...the technique of encoding more than just the RGBA value in a pixel". From what I can understand, this will be useful when we comp multiple layers. The example used in episode 95 of fxguide TV is several candles spaced apart and a logo as the main animated object. When we want to comp the logo between the candles, we render at least 3 passes. The candles behind the logo. The logo itself. And the candles in front of the logo. We don't have the freedom to move the logo at different candle depths without rendering new background and foreground passes. But with Deep Image Compositing, we can move the logo to any depth of a single render pass of the candles. Hopefully EIAS could implement DI Comp renders at some time in the future. For a clearer explanation on the topic, please see episode 95 of fxguide TV at: http://www.fxguide.com/index.php and especially: http://www.deepimg.com/ Thanks.

Thanks for sharing, Ito.

Thanks Nutley and Tomas. Will have a look at the links.

Very nice! Were the smoke trails done in EI as well?

I'm in the same boat. My latest tower Mac is a G5 from 2005 ;) After factoring in budget constraints and the need to have several years of productivity out of a new tower configuration, I'm planning on getting the 3.33 6 core MacPro. Still deciding how much memory to get. Would like 24GB (8x3) but too expensive at the moment. I'll mainly use it with EIAS, Photoshop, AE, and a modeler of some sort. Hope my old copy of EIM will still work. Some hints on this forum that a multicore aware camera will come with EIAS v9. I think the 6 core will be fine for me. If I need more horsepower, I'll take my files to a renderfarm. Would be great to have the high end 12 core though!