WHD
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Hi Chip,
I have posted my results both as a project and a small quicktime test. They are at the same ftp link as above.
While I was using the falloff, I was finding that it was insufficient to stop the gravity objects from moving beyond the intended limits. I was unable to get any linkage limits to function also. I ended up resorting to putting each visualization object inside a sphere and using collision to act as my limit. This is what seemed to solve the main issue.
I also found that my original linkage hierarchy was causinhg issues. As a result you will find that things are linked differently now. Some of the functions were acting in unexpected ways and this change in the linkage seemed to solve some of that.
I would have liked some of the motion to taper off slowly, as opposed to colliding with the inside of a sphere, but this will probably do unless your solution produces better results. I should also place a collision object around the visible sphere so that the objects do not pass into it, but theat is icing on the cake.
I did build this up to a full 3d scene as in the quicktime. I wanted to post the full 3D array. The project file was over 500 megs though. I trimmed it to a single plane for the EIAS file that I posted and it is down to 100 megs now.
See what you think . Looking forward to seeing your solution to this.
Bill
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Hi Chip,
I did get it working. Not perfectly but the results are tolerable. I am interseted to see what you have created. As ususal I became distracted when a client asked for something and have been dealing with that since my last post. I will try to post my results today for you to see.
I don't see a link or attachment on your post so let me know how to see what you have done.
Thanks,
Bill
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Hi Chip,
Made a breakthrough of sorts. I think I have it working almost as expected. My current test is rendering now.
Had to change the linkage arrangement and added a new boundry object to contain the gravity grid elements. If this test looks good I will post the results soon.
Bill
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Hi Chip,
Seems the zip archive got scrambled. I have re-zipped it and tested the file and it is working here now . I hope the effect will be the same for you. Thank you for your persistence.
Link is the same as above. There are now 2 identicle project files in case the name convention was part of the issue.
Bill
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Hi Chip,
I think the best sample is the project itself. The 4 objects are 2 forces, a small cube and a large sphere. The reaction I'm getting is close to what I want but the hierarchy limits setting is having no influence as far as I can see. The sphere is not part of the sim. Just there for the visual.
Here is a link to the project file on my ftp: I'll keep it live for a few days.
http://www.digitaldempsey.com/ftp6/
Bill
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Hi All,
Been a while since I was here last. Things have been slow for a while now in the 3D business side of my work.
I am testing right now for a potential project. My goal is to create a visual representation of gravity similar to the effect you see with the distorted grid used in many shows to suggest the effect of the gravitational field on celestial bodies.
My aim is to try something that is stylistically new. To that end I'm trying to make a matrix of cubes in 3 dimensions. Imagine a planar grid and upon each vertex is placed a tiny cube Remove the grid so that only the cubes remain. Now replicate this grid of cubes and displace it perpendicular to the face of the original plane by the distance between each cube. We now have a 3D field of cubes.
The idea is to attract the cubes to a sphereical body as it passes through the field. As the sphere passes out of range the matrix of cubes returns to it's original position.
I have tried to use Bullet and forces to achieve this and am having issues getting the correct effect.
I have simplified the project to test my methodology. There are 4 objects. Here are their curent settings.
First is a gravitational marker object (cube) with its link type set to free, its limit position settings on and set so that it will not move beyond + or - 20 EI units in all directions .
Second, I placed at the cube's center a (force object) with it's linktype set to lock since it is the force that I want to hold this element of the matrix together. It is set to attract the gravitational object to it and hold it in place. The force object has a range of 100 and a power of .5 It also has an acceleration of 1.0 and is set as an attractor with force center as its setting. A spring factor of .5.
The next object is another force object. It is also set as an attractor. It has a Xform range of 1000 units in all directions with a drop off of .5. Its properties are set as follows. Acceleration is 2 . It is an attractor set to force center. with a spring factor of .5.
This object is also animated to move across the space of the test. It begins with its dropoff range beyond the gravity detector cube. As it moves the cube enters its field and is attracted to it as planned. The problem is that the cube then follows the moving field and does 2 unexpected things.
1.) it ignors it's link limits and moves beyond 20 units.
2.) it is not returning to its other force object when the moving force passes out of range.
Any suggestions on what I can do to fix this are welcomed.
Once I get a single cube behaving as expected I then need to set hundreds of them into the matrix configuration that I mentioned earlier so methods need to be compatible with this goal.
Hope this makes sense. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Sincerely,
Bill Dempsey
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Hi All,
I have been contacted by a client who is asking if I can find a way to import a CAD file types that I've never seen before. The file types are .jt , .stp and .step files. There is a model that is in these formats and to do the project I need to find a way to get these into EIAS. Anyone know anything about these file formats?
The file that I'm told is a .jt does not used a .jt at the end of anything but rather it is folder filled with many files with all different names. I think this format saves out each part independently. Here is a example of a few of the first in a series of files.
17d20418-2m3_t3.prt.1
17d20418-2m3_t2.prt.1
17d20418-2m3_t1.prt.1
17d20420_t1.prt.1
12h7500.prt.1
0-140595-0.prt.1
_ug641fddcmub.prt.1
_83101067_s00_x00.prt.1
14_940_111_a_12_10.asm.1
17d20418-2m3_3.asm.1
10-00-4452-1285_s20_x00.prt.1
17d20418-2m3_2.asm.1
17d20418-2m3_1.asm.1
17d20418-2m3.asm.1
17_0-1_5_s20_x00.prt.1
10-40450-12s_s00_x00.prt.1
Anybody recognize this file format? Any thoughts on how to convert this to something useful would be greatly appreciated.
Bill
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Hi All,
I was wondering where Triple D Tools has gone? I was looking into updating AFractal and can't find the web site any more. If they are in fact gone I hope someone has taken over their products since they had a number of cool items.
Bill
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Hi All,
A bit late on this reply but I have added moving trees on a number of occasions to projects by pre-rendering Onyx trees as moving clip-able textures out of 6.5 . This is because the actual moving storm trees were always a bit of a burden if you needed more than a few.
To be honest I have found that if your camera moves substantially much of the tree motion gets visually lost unless you are rendering out a real storm. Sweeping fly bys do not benefit from subtle tree motion at all. Static or very slow moving shots are perfect for mapped trees. The primary issue is with close up trees where the camera causes paralax in the branches. Here there is no real solution in newer versions of EIAS.
One thought here would be to set up the scene and camera move in an earlier version of EIAS like 5 or 6 and then render out the 3d moving tree or trees there using storm and EIAS's great comping options. Then comp it into the rest of the scene done in EIAS 8 in layers in something like After Effects.
You can of course export the (static) models from Onyx . I did try exporting sequential models but this is very limiting as the cycle function gets rapidly overloaded with the size of a typical tree. I got a single palm tree working using this method but it was very time consuming for the results.
An area I have not explored is morph targets but I suspect that it would be difficult to get a natural looking motion if it will even work at all.
Hopefully one day Onyx will feel there is enough stability on the Mac OS to resume support of Storm in EIAS. Storm was one of the deciding factors back when I first bought EIAS in the early 90s as opposed to other 3d software.
Bill
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Tomas,
Any chance that we might be able to get some export features as well while work is happening in that area. While I'm doing practically everything in EIAS these days I frequently need to give other folks ,that I work with, certain resources. I really love FBX in but it would be great to have FBX out too.
Bill
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Hi All,
Is it possible to add interactive dynamics to Bullet? In other words could the user interact with a dynamic simulation while it is running in real time using maybe a combination of keys and sort of Mouse Tracker type interface?
This could have all sorts of uses. We could use something like this to help control dynamic vehicles in Bullet. Would be nice if we could accelerate or apply brakes and possibly even steer the cars if we choose not to preset the path. Reelmotion allowed you to set your cursor to center frame and then pushing the mouse forward accelerated, pulling back applied brakes and moving the mouse from left to right enabled steering.
All sorts of interested interactive effects where the user could apply some sort of force or collision and time it manually would be possible. Might even be useful dressing a scene being able to place things and then letting them settle to their natural position by gravity on surfaces in real time.
I know that the Bullet demo we were first given had an interactive component where we could shoot shapes or apply forces by hitting keys. So is this possible inside of Animator?
Bill
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I have a couple of additional forces requests.
First I think it would be nice if there were an air drag force. I'm thinking a bit toward the future here as I think forces can one day be integrated into other features like particle systems and soft body dynamics. Could be used to make things appear to be under water, hair or strands that trail their source object (Think jelly fish) . Air drag might even be the thing that helps dampen the spin Richard's leaves?
Another thing I would like to see is a jiggle force. I'm thinking of some sort of spring like mechanism that could be used for things like character animation to make flesh jiggle or add camera shake. It could have frequency ,randomness and limits settings. It could be activated upon collision, object motion both key framed and dynamic or generally applied.
Bill
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Hi All,
Wow, beta 9a46, Spectacular work Igors ! The new forces are amazing. I'm testing and getting really stunning results. Here is one of my clumping tests.
Bill
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While testing out the 64 bit camera I found that I had to run a series of tests to determine what my limits were based upon the Ram I had and how I had it divided between threads. It would be really nice if there was away to auto calculate the maximum ram requirements for a scene at a proposed render size and settings. (Sort of an expanded Projects statistics box with more info)
That way you could get a readout that says something like:
CURRENT RENDER SETTINGS
RENDER_SIZE : 1920 x 1080
RENDER SETTING: GI
SHADERS : 2
TEXTURES : 128
SCENE_SIZE : 17,876,282_ Polygons
SCENE REQUIRES MINIMUM_ XXX gigs of RAM per thread
This way a scene could be optimized both with settings in EIAS and in camera. Would be even better if the auto calculate could determine Max% ram usage on a parameter basis so if getting rid of a shader or texture could cut a gig of ram the user would know how to allocate resources.
Bill
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Great idea. This has been a really big issue for me too. I have hoped for a while now that a material scale function could be added that would scale all the components of a material (shaders and textures) locked together. It is a real mess when you have a complex material with multiple textures and shaders and things like bump scaling built into the shaders. I have spent hours resizing materials for new projects because they were built at different scales.
I have been separating materials by standard scales as my stop gap solution. So as a result I have a wood floor designed for 1 GU = 1 inch and one for 1 GU = 1 foot and 1 GU =1 meter. but doing this for all materials is too time consuming.
It seems to me that there are a number of ways to attack this issue. However, the "link material components function" needs to be at the core of what ever is done here.
Might be useful to add a scale function to the material save options.
Sort of a 1 GU = X and then when you get to the application of the material you could simply fill in the 1 GU = (your current project scale) and it would automatically size to the project. At least this would be nice additional option to your numerical box. (Your auto calculation function suggestion at work)
Bill
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Hi Tomas and Diego,
That sounds great. My thought is not a specific type of force but rather what I hope attractor/magnetic forces might be able to do. I would really love to be able to set a series of spheres of different sizes in a space with zero gravity and have them clump together on their own. It would be cool if both Proximity and mass could be calculated based upon geometry and then these forces magnified if necessary for the effect. That way larger objects would have a greater pull on smaller and closer objects would clump sooner than more distant objects. If these features could be implemented in this way I would be ecstatic.
As for additional forces It sounds as if many are covered unless you wanted to add an explosive force like blaster has.
With regard to wind I always thought Power Particles fans feature was a cool way to add wind with a directional icon that can be positioned and aimed like geometry. If a Fan like force could also be animated that would be even cooler.
PS... I like Diego's vortex too. Add some fall off to that both close and far distance and objects could be captured and go into orbit around others.
Bill
Forgot to add this.
Not sure if this is force related or vehical specific but an acceleration and braking function /force for the auto sim in bullet would be nice. Currently there appears to be no way to do a burn out or skid with cars.
Bill
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Hi Dave and Tomas,
I looked back on my original post and find that I was not very precise in my description. The project I had been working on, to be more clear , had a model with separate parts linked together in parent child form. Each part of the model had its own texture map. This was the circumstance that was not compatible as opposed to a single one part textured model.
Sorry for the confusion.
Bill
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Hey Tomas,
Turns out that Pathfinder was a better fit for this specific project. Appears that Contortionist prefers textures that are mapped to the plug-in or a procedural shader . In this case neither was a good option because of the arrangement of the models and complexity of the texture layering .
I switched the project over to Pathfinder which produced similar results and handles textures differently according to Blair. All is working fine now.
Seems I had never noticed this issue before because all prior projects that used Contortionist used models with materials that contained no precisely registered texture maps.
Bill
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Hi All,
After seeing no response here I contacted Blair directly and this is the portion of his response relating to this question.
Bill
You probably need to texture the plugin group instead of the children.
Technically, the plugin generates geometry using the child vertices and
polygons as a reference.
IIRC, plugins that generate geometry can't make use of textures from other
sources.
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Hi All,
I've used Contortionist a number of times over the years but I've never run into this issue before in part because I don't think I've tried to deform a textured model before.
I have created a textured model and am using contortionist to deform it along a path made with an effector. A render of the model prior to adding the plugin looks proper. However after it is deformed along the path the texture appears to be gone. I have been using a master material but then tried to apply the texture as a per model texture with no improvement. Anyone know whats going on and how to fix this?
Bill
PS... I should add that the textures are not UV but simple flat planar textures. Pretty strait forward.
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Congratulations Tomas, Igors and Team,
Great new site.
Bill
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Hey Richard,
It is Rodeo version 1.0.
I've tried emailing Jens about 2 months ago about updating my O2Fact but never heard back. I can always try again re Rodeo and see what happens.
Thanks,
Bill
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Hey Richard,
Can't find a version on mine. The last modified day is Nov 27 2007. Probably whatever shipped with EIAS7.
Bill
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Hi All,
I've used Rodeo quite a bit with great results and one of the issues that arises frequently is that objects that have fallen and are resting peacefully on the ground suddenly and spontaneously start to move again on their own with no additional forces being applied. They then start hopping around like a fish on the floor.
I read that the best way to reduce this is to make adjustments in the advanced tab to the Auto Disable setting. My current settings are:
1. Velocity Threshold... .01 EI Units per frame
2. Timeout... 2 frames
3. Always Enabled... 3 frames
Anybody have a suggestion for a better setting or an alternate strategy?
My alternate strategy of last resort has been to duplicate geometry after the sim is run in the spot where it fell and swap geometry at that frame with static geometry. It is a bit time consuming in a complex sim so I'm looking for a better solution. Any thoughts?
Bill
Trying to create a gravity simulation
in Technical issues
Posted
Thank You Tomas for posting Chip's files.
Chip,
This looks great. I think you have a more elegaant solution to the problem.
Bill