fantomaz

Hey, thanks all for your positive feedback! We love to hear that! Sometimes its hard to discuss with customer how things have to look, example: Tomas asked me, why the car in the animation does not look like the car at the posterframe. The answer is simple, Volkswagen dont want the car looks "good" when it comes to end of life, the car has to be matt, no reflections, a little dirt and so on. No one wants to recycle his shiny new car ;-) and no one wants to see something like this. Ok, customer is the one with the money, even when EI can render brilliant old and new cars... So (Igors) please finish the shader "Dirt" for Intel machines ;-) Alex

Me too! Its powerful, its with a wink and most people understand the meaning immediately! Alex

Hi all after waiting for 5 month, finally the movie is online :) and i am proud to show it to the community. Its about a car, that has reached the end of life and what happend then. There are 3 parts of the film, 1.) demontage of usefull parts, 2.) shredder of the rest and 3.) the VOLKSWAGEN SiCon process, its the refining of useful materials for a new production process. All in all its 4 minutes of pur EI :), everything is built with EI-Modeler, except the VW-Golf, he is a turbosquid model. Inside the animation there is lots of EI specialitys -> Rodeo, XP and so on. The work was done from November2009 to April2010 and was rendered on a MacOcto and MacQuad with 12 Slaves running Camera 8. Here are the links to the VOLKSWAGEN site direct: German English And here is the link to my own server, its a much better resolution: German English Have fun Alex

It looks like the site is gone, did someone copied all the forum entries? Alex

...and some specs: The Race The three cars are: AC-COBRA 427 (model is years old and repaired/enhanced by me) MB CLS 500 (was a christmas gift from turbosquid) AW-COBRA (was modeled in Modeler over the years by me) Over all, there are around 3million polys, rendering was at 876x584 because of the camera maps. The final cut was at 800x450. The hall is a simple model with two camera maps, one left side, one in the main hall, with alpha camera maps to clip the holes in the wall, so you can go from one hall to the next (was fun to do that!) CJs script 'car_mover' is for tire rotation and steering, the 'car safe' and all the things in it, are from various jobs i did over the years. The clothing over the cars in the car-safe are made with sim-cloth in a separate project (each) and importet 'baked' into the main animation project. The lightning is done with simple spots that have fog around them to have the effect of dust. The video edditing was done in FCP, the sound was done in Soundtrack. This was fun to do, because the two apps are very integrated in each other so you can make changes very easy. The sounds of the cars are original sounds founded on YouTube, exept the sound for the AW-COBRA. Here i used the sound from a test drive with an TESLA Roadster (electro car). If you have any question, ask me :) Alex

Hi Richard, here is Ian´s tutorial: http://www.eias3d.com/process/show_video.php?id=1157&iframe Alex

Hm, its the same like days before with the new 8.0 download. Browser stopps before finished downloading the file. Unfortunately Safari/Firefox thinks, that the file was complete downloaded but is unable to open that (broken) file of course. Alex

Hi Michael, maybe your browser has not enough downloaded to start the movie? (buffer) Sometimes, when the movie is so coded that min. 20% of the file has to be on your side, you click elsewhere because it took too long to wait. So the movie cant play and if you try moments later, the movie must be downloaded again from start because its a new session. Wait and see if the movie starts after a 'long' wait... When the movie was broken or something like that, QuickTime normally shows this with a bad movie icon in your browser or a question mark. Alex

Nice! I like it :)

The same here, sometimes the dl goes to 50MB and stops, sometimes only 15MB and so on. But no complete dl is possible at the moment. The wired thing is, that the finder thinks its complete...if you then try to open the .dmg the error message comes up. Normally the finder "knows" if a dl is broken or not. But the good thing is: the dl comes with a speed between 500KB/s and 1000KB/s :) unfortunately something is closing the connection too early. Alex

No, its not a demoversion, sorry. Maybe we see in the near future a demo of V8 :) The last demoversion i remember was V5 or V6, if i am correct, but someone of the new developers can clear things up. Alex

Jipiehhhhhh.... I am one day out of office and cant look whats happened in the world (no UMTS, no Edge, no nothing..) and now THAT! Fantastico! We have a new home, a new chance and -most important for me- new power! Let's make things real strong! Congrats all Alex

Are the pixel ratio the same? I always use square pixels in EI -> 1024x576 -> when 16:9 in PAL is needed, or 768x576 when 4:3 in PAL is needed. All Adobe products are aware of that setting. And look for DV compression in AE, its 1:1.07. You get wired things (not only stretched spheres) on the screen sometimes. Alex

No problem, comes this evening. Alex

Dont do this: when you are in frame mode of the project window and want to change the visibility setting of a model and go to the specific channel to write in the word "On" or "Off" and you want to have it only for a few frames, you have to click before the green triangle, otherwise the channel will become "On" or "Off" for the whole time of the project. But don´t click the triangle when the text edit field (where you can type) is active, Ei will crash. First click elsewhere, so that the text field is not active. Alex

Hi Mark, thanks! I will tell more, but first i need some sound for the clip.... We have 30 degrees inside, so there will be some more days do do the sound :) Alex

Years ago there was a guy who stepped from darkness into the EIAS world with a clip that was so stunning, that i believe its also today best viewable. His name was Teague Clare. He did a shot, where a car drives through an old industrial hall and at the end it bumps against an empty barrel (or something like that) while the car performs an emergency break. The clip was so cool, that i decided: some day, when there is enough time, i will produce a similiar clip. It took me more than 10 years, but here it is, enjoy. It was only for fun and learning purposes and to see if i can do such things. Many thanks to Cj for the XP-script: car_mover (did you get my PN?) Thanks also to Jens, who always impressed me with his car movies and the quality of his renderings! Greetings Alex Just in case the picturelink above doesnt work, click here: http://www.cobra-gestaltung.com/EIAS/The_Race.mov

Are you sure you did not photograph real buildings? - just kidding - Great work! Alex

Hi Tom, ok i will wait and see whats possible. Ah, and: sorry about the Brazilian soccer team.... Alex

Three things i can exclude which i thought they were involved in these errors. First: Screensaver... When i disabled the screensaver on the Ramamachine, it looks like that Rama was working more stable, but after lots of Rama jobs it fails with or without screensaver and stops as discribed above sending files to the slaves. Second: heat... My main ethernetswitch (1000er) was so hot (we have a daily temp right now of more than 35 degrees) that i could not touch the surface of the case! In the night i opened the case and put a big fan on top so that it wont get so hot in the working hours. No sucess, Rama stops sending files to the slaves . Third: internetconnection (as Tom suggest) I disconnected my network from the internet so that it is only a home net with no connections to anywhere else, no sucess. The next thing i will do is: replace the system (10.6.4) with a new install and reinstall all apps on that machine. Too bad. Alex

BOAH! I pull my hat Alex

Cool movement of the copter, looks real to me, congrats! Also the SimCloth part looks very good! Alex

Hi Anthony, you can also have a look here: http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/wiki/Camera_Errors All known errors are listed there, helps in most cases :shy: Alex

Hi folks, as the title says, i have a new Rama headache: Rama is full of jobs and stops sending control files to the slaves. Not to every slave unfortunately, and there is no pattern of how this happens and to which slaves. Sometimes it stops sending to only one slave and to only a handful of cameras at this adress (f.e.: Octomac with 8 Cameras and two to six Cameras/Slaves are "released by master") after the next start of Rama it stops only one slave at this adress and seven are rendering till the end. Sometimes, when there are many jobs in the queue, all jobs are stopped over time so that no job finished. And Rama did not crash! It stops only sending files to the slaves and tells the slaves that they are realeased from master. I have done all the usual things, prefs, new copy of Rama, checking firewall, and so on, nothing helped. What i did before these errors came up, was the update on that machine to 10.6.4 and the normal autoupdates from Apple for security reasons. Any ideas someone? Greetings from hot Germany (not only because of the 4:1 :blush: ) Alex

Hi Scott, i use the i7 iMac with 8GB RAM and use the 4 hardwarecores with 2GB per Camera. In case of lowpoly projects, i switch to 6-7 Cameras with around 1,1GB per Camera to also use the virtual cores. Works like a horse! iMac i7 comes with 4 cores and via hyperthreading he has 8 cores. fantomaz