rtrowbridge

I just purchased a program called Visionlab Studio from FXHome. It's similar to After Effects, but was within my budget. I used it to add some effects to an animation I did recently in EIAS v.8. Here is the link. So far, I'm liking the program. It accepts both MOV files and image streams, so I have a couple options of getting my EIAS animations into it. I feel like it makes my video editing suite more complete. I have EIAS for 3D rendering, Visionlab for post processing effects, and VideoStudio to put it all together. It's still just a hobby, but it sure is a lot of fun...:D Ross

Telegraphics has a great plugin that allows Photoshop to read and write IMG files. Unfortunately, my budget doesn't allow me to purchase Photoshop for personal use, so I use Paint Shop Pro X2(PSP) on my Windows Vista laptop. It appears PSP has a GEM IMG file format hard coded which interferes with the Telegraphics plugin, and I haven't been able to import IMG files from EIAS. If I selected EIformat as the file type, I could get a preview image and dimensions, but would get an error when I tried to open the file. With a lot of help from Toby T. at Telegraphics, I did some experimenting and found a workaround. The plugin reads and writes IMG, EIM, and EIZ files. If I want to open an IMG file, I change the extension to EIM or EIZ. The file will then open in PSP without any problems for editing. I then save the image and change the extension back to IMG. The saved file works great in EIAS. I tried using an image with the EIM extension and it did open in EIAS, but had problems with mapping. Only flat mapping worked. Any other mapping type caused problems with the map being badly distorted. As a test, I took a model of a Centauri Vorchon (Babylon 5) and opened all the JPG files in PSP. I saved each file as an EIM, and then changed the extensions to IMG. I moved the original JPGs to a different directory and opened the project in Animator. I pointed Animator to the the IMG files when it couldn't find the JPGs. Once the project finished opening, all the IMG maps were mapped properly with their UV coordinates. I would recommend using the EIZ rather than the EIM extension as Modeler uses the EIM extension and could lead to confusion. The attached file is a snapshot of the Vorchon saved as an IMG, opened in PSP and saved as a JPG.

Richard, I did use the same image as the reflection map. Originally, I did have a 3-point lighting rig, but the object is so reflective the shadows just never showed up. So I just turned the lights off and moved the camera around until I found the angle I liked. I like to play with Wings3D sometimes. This 'thingy' started out as a cube. I just kept extruding, scaling, insetting, intruding and moving faces until I ended up with this. No more than 10 minutes total. The long, curvy wings don't quite fit the rest of it, but oh well... I was happy enough with this one that I brought it into EIAS to render. Other than quickly setting up the reflections and giving it the blue glow engines, there wasn't much thought given to this. Ross

I posted this on scifi-meshes.com a few months back, but thought I would share it here since there have been a few requests for more artwork. This was done in about 10 minutes in Wings3D and then rendered in EIAS v.7. The only lights in the scene are the blue engine lights. Everything else is just reflection. I thought it turned out pretty good considering I was just fooling around at the time. Ross

Super from erightsoft.com will do that. The interface is a little different, but once you're used to it, it is quite powerful. To download the program, you'll have to scroll through a couple of very packed screens about Super. They won't allow a direct link to the download page. But it's Freeware, so I can't complain too much. Ross

I just purchased and installed v.8 on my 32 bit Vista machine and am getting the same error message. I've set the camera memory to 900 mb. So it looks like just switching to 32 bit Vista isn't the answer. I have v.8 at work as well running just fine on XP Pro. I don't have an XP partition on this computer and don't have the disk space to create one. It's kind of pointless to have the latest, greatest version of the software if Camera is crippled. It looks to me like a v.8.0.1 is needed. Ross

I don't have a project where it happens all the time, but I am seeing this on my PC on about 1/3 of the projects I send to Renderama. It stops when the last frame completes rendering, but doesn't start stitching. I did a test render of an animation eight times, only changing the QuickTime compression codec, and had to close and then restart Renderama three times to get all the animations to stitch. The next animation in the que would begin rendering. It just wasn't stitching. This is with 8.0 on a Quad Core Dell computer. Ross

I also started with the 3DToolkit and made the jump to 7.0.1. I just got spousal approval to buy 8.0 with my tax return. Just for fun, I've been playing around with Toolkit projects and getting them into 7.0. I created a new project in the Toolkit with 19 grouped objects. I applied master materials (both bitmap and DVG shaders), animated the camera, animated the grouped facts (position and rotation). I even tried a standard shape. I began by merging the Toolkit project into a project in 7.0. As expected, the standard shape wouldn't come through. It gave an error, but otherwise the project did successfully merge. DVG shaders opened the "Cannot Find" dialog, but I was able to "Find" the equivalent shader in the 7.0 Shaders directory and have the shader work. Bitmaps came though okay, as did the master material. Both camera and fact animation channels came through okay as well. After trying these different things, I tried opening the project directly into 7.0. It kicked out the standard shape again, but the textured, animated objects opened just fine. I remember trying to open Toolkit projects in 7.0 when I first purchased it without much success, so this was a nice surprise for me. (I was probably fighting standard shapes vs ubershapes without knowing it) I didn't play around with light settings, so I can't comment on that, but otherwise I'm pretty happy. 7.0 did hang once, but merged the same settings on a second try. So anyway, it might not be necessary to progress through each version. I've now opened a couple other projects successfully, though one with a Big Dipper galaxy won't open. Ross

Add me to the list wanting to see the Demo or feature-limited version. I got sucked in with the DVGarage version. It got me hooked and I'm using v.7 AND v.8 now. I just finished with H&R Block yesterday, so I should be ordering my v.8 in 2-3 weeks. Now with v.8 on my work computer (they bought it for me after seeing what I was producing with v.7 on my personal laptop for them), and soon v.8 on my laptop, I'll be in rendering heaven. Ross

I do my modelling in EIM and Wings3D. At work, I am given files as SAT files from SolidWorks that I run through EIM to get the fact files. I also use Accutrans3D for file conversions. Ross

Frank, I use EIAS on a laptop as well. I took the the lanyard from a thumb drive and attached it to my EIAS dongle. It's a whole lot easier to keep track of the dongle now that it has a long tail. I'm not a big fan of the dongle, but understand why they use it. I've had friends offer me fully functional copies of the latest Max and Maya programs (which I've declined). I'd hate to see the same thing happen to EIAS, when we all want them to succeed well beyond v.9. Ross

Ian, I sure hope not. I'd hate to see this added to the Mac only toolsI would like to have for EIAS. I'm still hoping that Instancer will be ported over someday. Thanks for checking it out. Ross

Ian, I can't get this to work on my PC (v8.0). I tell EAIS to open an obj or 3ds file (step 4) and it just goes instantly back to an empty screen without displaying the FBX import box or opening a project. Currently, I use Accutrans3D to get the file I want into a Collada file and then use FBXConverter from AutoDesk to create the FBX file I can open with EIAS. To be able to just open the the 3ds or obj file would be so much nicer. Ross

Isn't Instancer still a Mac only application? Those of us using a PC would love to see it ported over. Ross