bbuxton

Hello Tomas I moved away from Mac Os some time ago, I still have an old Mac lying around but it runs El Capitan so EIAS v8 won't run on it. It runs fine on Win 7 just no plugins. My biggest mistake at the beginning of my career was spending so much on plugins for EIAS. For now I only needed my license codes updated for Arete Psunami and maybe Onyx Treestorm to run my old projects, the other plugin licenses would have been a bonus but I can live without them. It is unfortunate that Blair was too busy to help with that. I will only need 64bit installers if I upgrade to 9.1 or 10. I should say that my old EIAS renders still look richer with greater depth than current renders, even unbiased and pbr miss something.

I have lots of old EIAS projects that I would like to revisit but all of them rely on plugins I can no longer use because I cannot update my licenses. I contacted Blair some time ago to try and transfer my NorthernLights plugins (vol 1-4) as well as Psunami and Psyclone from Mac to Windows. He did not have the time. Unless Tomas and co can acquire rights to manage the licensing and distribution of these abandoned EIAS plugins they are long gone. I did not upgrade since v8 precisely because I could not see any of these plugins coming along for the ride.

That worked! Thank you for that :-)

Yes it is a duo dongle. It works on this mac under Snow Leopard, my daughters iMac on Lion and an old G5 PPC on Tiger. The dongle installer does not seem to do anything to get things working on Mountain Lion.

hmmm sorry to be a pain but the v9 dongle installer is not working either.

No I don't have v9 yet. Just the v8 M Lion dongle installer (link from this forum) and M Lion update for v8. I can reboot back to Snow Leopard but have a project where I need to use Creative Cloud stuff. BB

The Mountain Lion dongle installer is still not working for me. Animator still returns 'hardware key not found' - I have installed both the Mountain Lion dongle installer and the Mountain Lion update to no avail. Edit:- If I boot back into Snow Leopard everything works fine, so not a dongle failure. Interestingly when I unplug the key the system thinks it is a disk but looking in system info shows the following. Product ID: 0x0300 Vendor ID: 0x04b9 (Rainbow Technologies, Inc.) Version: 2.00 Speed: Up to 1.5 Mb/sec Manufacturer: SafeNet Inc. Location ID: 0x1d200000 / 2 Current Available (mA): 500 Current Required (mA): Unknown (Device has not been configured)

Are Psunami & Psyclone 64bit? Curious if bobbing in Psunami can interact with bullet. Have a offshore wind farm platform that I need to show tethered to seabed with a bit of bad weather. :shy:

Blair got back to me on 64bit. He says that he would like to do the updates but that it is not a trivial undertaking and that the majority of his time has to be devoted to projects that 'pay the bills' So eventually but he can't say how long it will take. Psunami, Dante and Placer are the most important ones for me, though I do have Psyclone and the first 4 Artisan sets too. Would consider switching from Psyclone to KMyst for 64bit but not entirely sure how they compare. Anyway it is reassuring that Blair wants to update the plugins.

Now I feel really lazy! as that is generally how I do it. Many thanks for the the v9 prj will check it out to see whats new when I get home. The nice thing about a shadow catcher is that I only have to apply it to the ground plane once. Now if I need to move the camera around for a snapshot from a different point of view I need to do steps 2-5 again. With a shadow catcher I just click and render a new snapshot no other steps needed. If I need to change the sIBL background - just re-render. I never did like the work hard bit in the old EI strapline, much prefer Work smart, render fast retire young!

It is a pity that the WoodLab shader slipped through the net. Would love to see that updated to 64bit. David Argemi kindly sent me the UB update for that and the Conception shaders a few years ago, are you still in touch?

sIBL is brilliant..... Ola Tomas Still playing with the demo.... :-) The sIBL implementation is really good, but I was looking through the shaders etc to find a shadow catcher. Whilst I appreciate that it is straight forward to insert shadows on a ground plane in Photoshop or a compositor, it would be better to have a shadow catcher shader when doing snapshot renders. I shoot hdri panoramas as part of my work and most are stored as sIBL sets. More than happy to share some of them - once I have raised the cash for my upgrade! Brian

Is there a clear roadmap for third party plugins and shaders porting to 64bit. I know this is a huge task but some sense of what can / will be updates vs what won't is important.

SpeedTree Cinema exports animation via Point Cache or Skinned Skeletal Data (????) It would be nice to see a way of supporting this or perhaps something to work with XFrog xfr data. I too really miss Onyx Treestorm but with little or no activity in regards to Mac or anything outside of 3dsMax in a decade I think this ship has sailed. I'm looking to replace the Treestorm with SpeedTree in the not to distant future, if nothing else so I can move on from SnowLeopard. So support of its animation would be terrific.

Call to arms for plugin vendors!! I know this is a difficult one but....... There are some great plugins for EIAS, even though a number of them are a bit old, but damn they are expensive by todays standards. When I first bought into EIAS (circa v2.9) I spent a fortune on plugins trying to expand the feature set to get some parity with competing applications. This is an inevitable thing when looking at a 3D program as a new user. You look at how much it costs and the feature list then compare it with what else is out there. So okay:- SDS, instancing, volumetrics, a few modelling tools, decent particles all cost extra but..... so much that it is very a difficult sale both for the plugin vendors and EIAS3D! It would be nice to see a good promo or some repackaging of the core plugins and I'm sure that this would go a long way to rekindle interest in both EIAS and 3rd party products. My upgrade to v9 is coming but I need to budget for the extras too, before I make this purchase.

I have been using modo with EIAS for a few years and it works well and has limited sculpting ability. However if you are used to modelling in a CAD package then Bonzai & ViaCad maybe easier to work with, except that for your terrain detailing you really want a sculpting package. ZBrush and 3D Coat are both really good, Mudbox has a more standard interface (but the price $$$). As long as you take the time to ensure the UV's are nice and clean EIAS will not have too much difficulty. You will probably need Encage to work with subDs however. My concern is with instances. I never managed to get placer deposit to work, not once. You will need a good solution here or it will be nigh on impossible to create the level of detail a project like this would need. Modo is brilliant here, I'm just finishing up a city animation project using instances to the tune of over 3.5 billion polygons! I don't think many current 3D packages really struggle with high poly counts if managed well. You can get a CAD loader & a SubD 2 Nurbs exporter for Modo if you need better integration with a CAD workflow.

It is Lifeforms that I am most curious about. Do you think it is a good substitute/replacement for MB7std? Do you think Lifeforms is pleasant/easy to use?

I'm looking to replace my ageing copy of MotionBuilder 7 std (the cheap one that worked on Mac before Autodesk killed it off) so that I can upgrade to Os X Mountain Lion when it is available. Whilst I could run it under bootcamp/parallels I understand that Credo's Lifeforms/Danceforms have been updated to work on Intel Macs & Lion. I think Tomas & Alonzo have used it in the past, so I thought I'd enquire here on how it measures up to my old MB7std or current 3d packages that have advanced a fair bit for CA over recent years. It's very cheap but it would need to offer more than what I have already (EIAS 8, LW 11, C4Dr13Studio, Modo 601, Daz etc.). Of course there is Mixamo too but I'm not so keen on using a web solution. I should point out that my interest is for editing stock mocap rather than hand animation.

Having too much software is like having too many drinks. Nice until it gets out of hand and you end up fired. ;-)

I have few problems bringing in models with UV's from ZBrush & Modo. The main thing is to be sure you do not have multiple UV's attached to the same object. You do not need to use Obj2Fact for good results, I find it less reliable than EI's native obj/fbx import. Your biggest obstacle it seems is using so many applications that do essentially the same thing but each with its own set of quirks. This must be a nightmare to stay on top of especially in regard to EI's own good measure of quirkiness. Try sticking with One Nurbs modeler One SDS modeler One Sculpting application One Animation application (EIAS I hope!) Zip up or delete the others so they don't distract you!

FormZ & Shark FX for Hard surface Modo, Lightwave, ZBrush & Quidam for everthing else. Also using 3dCoat for retopo & UV but not completely got the hang of it yet. Oh & don't laugh but I got a license for Groboto last week the v3 beta is awesome!! Unfortunately Quidam doesn't export fbx, it would be great if EIAS would support Collada in the near future.