hurricane

The amount of money I've spent on Adobe products in my career is incredible . . . They seem to think they are infallible, however, if you think about it, in my job, multimedia development, I can find other good alternatives, illustrator = corel draw, photoshop = gimp and aperature, dreamweaver = coda (or other), acrobat=preview, flash (which is on it's way out in my opinion) = html5 (any number of alternatives), Acrobat = preview, premier = final cut, aftereffects=motion, media encoder = compressor, I could go on . . . I'm already dropping flash, I've used gimp for normal maps, the rest of these would cost about as much combined as a new copy of Photoshop. So beware Adobe, the more people that leave you for other products, the better these products will become and there is a lot of unhappiness going on . . . I'm already starting to use some of these, my Adobe upgrade path had better be good. grrrrrr . . . . .

Another one. . . While I think of it ... Icon in the diffuse tab to pick a texture as the display texture. M. http://www.phpbb.com/

UV editor, multiple uv per item, motion data resampling. Ie 120 frames to 25 frames per sec on import.

UV editor, multiple uv per item, motion data resampling. Ie 120 frames to 25 frames per sec on import.

Hello, does anyone know what's happened to the page where you put your dongle number in and get your authorisation code back? or have I gone blind? I can't seem to find the page. I need to get eias running on my laptop . . . Help appreciated, Mat.

Thanks Stephane, Your work is great so it's good to know that you can help in the future, thanks for your details, I have realised that I should use other people more rather than try to do everything myself . . . As I said this job was filmed in a studio in the end. (Which was very difficult!) but there will be others in the future... Thanks again all! Mat.

Hey those look great, thanks! Just to let people know that the job is now being filmed traditionally so there is no longer a CGI option I'm afraid, I am however still interested in peoples work as I get a lot of product 3D work to do and don't always have the time, also if there is anyone in the UK that would be interested in meeting up, I'm based in London and am just generally interested! Thanks for the help! M.

Hi all, I have a job that I need to get done within the next week (ish), it's a well known whisky bottle that needs to be modeled/textured/animated to a high standard, I unfortunately don't have time to do it myself so I was wondering if there were any users in London that Might be interested? I have the bottle here. An example of the kind of thing they are looking for is here (1 min onward): They have the label artworks etc... If anyone is interested please message me :-) Mat.

Hi, I'm having the same problem, did you work out what the issue was, I can't seem to fix it . . .

Anyone know this? I'm still confused... M.

Hello all, I'm having some confusion over getting Global Illumination to pass through transparent objects, I was under the impression transparency allows rays/photons through glass? However I can't seem to get this to work, if I remove the glass from the scene then the exterior is lit, but with the glass in, just blackness, it might be just that it's really fiddly? I'm not sure . . . Please see attached . . . Help appreciated, Mat.

Thanks all, I think all I was doing wrong was to get the extension wrong, I'm not sure how or why I did that! I thought I'd copy the instruction text onto the EIAS forum so that other people can find it... Some Search Terms: RealFlow Real Flow to EIAS Northern Lights Plugin RealFlow 1.0 for ElectricImage To request an access code for this plugin send an e-mail to info@northernlights3d.com. This plugin can export scene data from ElectricImage to a RealFlow SD file. It can also read mesh files generated by RealFlow and create models in ElectricImage. To export a scene from ElectricImage: 1) Set the time thumb for the project to the beginning of the animation. 2) Add the plugin to the scene. 3) Link the models you want to export to the plugin. 4) Open the interface and set the mode to Scene Exporting. 5) Enter a filename to store the data into. Use ".sd" as the file extension. 6) Click OK. The plugin will tell you that it's in the export mode. 7) Preview the animation. Be sure that you have Drop frames turned off and that you're not skipping frames. When the preview finishes, the plugin will tell you that it has stored the file. The file will be located in the EI Sockets folder. You can now import this into RealFlow. To import meshes from RealFlow: 1) RealFlow places the mesh .bin files in a folder called "meshes". Copy this folder into the EI Sockets folder. 2) Add the plugin to the scene. 3) Set the mode to Mesh Importing. 4) Click the Choose Mesh File and select the first mesh file. The files are numbered for each frame. 5) Click the OK button. The mesh will be generated. Note that the mesh doesn't smooth while the plugin is running in Animator. This is for performance reasons. It will smooth when you render the project. Also, you can use multiple instances of the plugin set to different meshes if you have a scene with multiple fluid flows. Typically, the fluids are saved as "Mesh0100001.bin" and "Mesh0200001.bin". The plugin uses the "00001" characters for the frame number and the "Mesh0*" as the fluid.

Hi Peops, Does anybody know of any EIAS to REALFLOW workflow tutorials using the Northern Lights Realflow plugin? I can't seem to get it to work.... Your help appreciated, Mat.

Thanks guys!! I actually cheated and photoshoped it, but I will be going back to it when I have more time and looking into this! M.

Hello, I was just wondering if there was an easy way to falloff to a colour, for example, I have a white ball, with a light on it and rather that the falloff go to grey at the edges, set the object to fall of to blue? or do I need to fiddle around with all sorts of settings to do this? Help appreciated, Mat.

Texture map but in the luminance channel and then theres a greyscale version in the transparency channel with the strength turned down a little . . . Still can't get the thing to emit light, I think it might be due to the adaptive dicer . . .

Emmmmm . . . well, I'm getting something! Here's a test: http://onlinedemosite.co.uk/eiasforum/light3Dtest.mov I've got a long plane running along a contortionist path with colour on a luminance map and the transparency on a transparency map, but I wanted to make it emit light using an area light, but cant seem to make it emit, is this possible with a ubershape plane? or is this whole idea the stuff of a mad mans dream? Mat. :P

Thanks for your reply! Yes, I can do it that way and I have particular, I was hoping to do it within EIAS so that I can use the light and reflections from the environment realistically on the objects that have to fly through it, if anyone knew of a convincing way? . . . but I'm not sure there is one, so I may well go with Particular anyway... Thanks again :-) M.

Hi eias community! I'm trying to work out a good way to do something like this: The light 'tracks' would need to need to animate on and bank on turns etc, but also be able to interact with items flying through the scene, so I was trying to keep it in EIAS rather than use After Effects. I thought swage might be able to do this but that seems to have popped out of existance? Any advice much appreciated! Mat.

I've had no problem with either of them and I got snow leopard straight away, not sure about all your plugins but these 2 are working fine for me. Mat.

Hi, thanks for all the help! Especially the file Tomas, it was interesting to see this method . . . Yes, in fact that was really my problem as the light areas that you would use for the reactive shader bright areas, were not in the diffuse tab, in fact they were reflections with reflection maps this is because I was making a kind of reflective varnish effect (a uv varnish), so I was unable to use a reactive shader as there was no diffuse bright area. Perhaps there is an opportunity here for a kind of global mask . . . something that any map could reference . . . is that making sense? Could be a nice touch . . . or maybe just the ability for procedurals to use independent masks from other textures . . . then of course there are decals, I've often thought this would be useful. So we would have a parent base material with child decals that appear in the same materials tab . . . (just thought I'd throw that curve ball in!!) I thought I was probably just not getting something but there does seem to be room for improvement here. Thoughts? :idea:

Yes, this works for adding a pixel based map over another pixel based map, i.e. it's like a decal with the alpha channel as a cutout, but is there any way to do this over a procedural texture in the Geometry/bump maps list. i.e. there is a procedural fractal shader under a pixel based bump map where the values on the pixel based map can be added or subtracted from the values of the procedural fractal shader underneath it, this way I could apply a fractal shader to create a bump over the whole of the geometry, then flatten it out where the type sits. . . and you thought your's sounded complicated!!

Hi, Thanks for the reply! Yes, sometimes I use geometry but this would be very tricky in this case as the text would have to be made around a circle and tapered and fitted very closely . . . It also has some very fine areas and has to stand up to quite a large render. The geometry would have to be extremely high res. I've got around the issue by just using some noise on the texture maps in photoshop (see attached) but I would like to know if there is a way of doing it using procedural fractal noise, maybe I'm just not getting something! It would be nice if you could in some way layer the bump channel to multiply or screen over the procedural to neutralise or add to it.

Hi, Can anyone point me in the right direction please, I'm having some issues. . . I have a procedural fractal noise, that I'm using as a bump on an item, I want to flatten it out using a texture so that the bump noise does not appear in certain areas using a texture map. i.e. the texture map neutralises the fractal bump. I don't seem to be able to do this. Does anyone have any tips for this please? Help much appreciated! Mat.

Hi, I think the link is broken for the exr2mesh plugin, I would very much like to download it so would it be possible to fix it please. Thanks! Mat.