Northern Lights

Please make a project file available to us so we can look into the problem.

I've tried to e-mail you back several times but there's some spam filtering somewhere that's bouncing the messages.

Not exactly. PD is very good at populating environments with stuff and each instance can be randomized in scale, orientation and position (i.e. jitter). If you want to cover a hillside with tons of trees, PD is the tool for you.

Current status: One problem-child left to fix (Blaster isn't liking 64-bit Camera for some weird reason). AG Shader updates PC versions New installers And I really should move my web host and build a new website. This project is taking a lot longer than I thought. The 64-bit stuff is a major headache. Stay tuned...

Howdy folks, Just wanted to give everyone a status update. I've been busy updating the collection for 64-bit Camera compatibility. This process is taking quite a bit longer than expected but I am making progress. There is a lot of work to do but I hope to have things done in the next couple of weeks. One downside to this process is that older projects including ones you may make in EI 9 using the 32-bit-only versions of the plugins won't work. It's never a good idea to change software versions in the middle of a project so keep your old stuff around for a while. Stay tuned... Blair M. Burtan Northern Lights Productions www.northernlights3d.com

AFAIK, my plugins will work under EI 9 although to be honest I haven't tested them myself. I haven't heard of any show-stopper changes to the plugin API.

Yes. You have to own an older version either from us or Triple D for the upgrade price to apply.

I'm still here. I just don't have a whole lot of time to work on plugin stuff. We did find some sort of problem with Dante and long renders (running out of memory) which never happened in earlier versions of Camera. I still need to look into it because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In general though, when talking about plugin problems, it's not enough to say there's a problem or even post a project because quite often the project isn't stripped down to bare essentials. And bare essentials could mean one or two particles and no other plugins or shaders. In addition, most plugins haven't been changed in a long time but EI has so we also need to verify that it's a plugin problem and not an EI problem. That can mean trying the same test in earlier versions of EI to see if it was still a problem in say EI version 6.5.

> Is there something we can do to support/aid you to built the new REELMOTION? One meeellllion dollars...and sharks with frickin' laser beams on top of their heads.

EI has always been the bastard stepchild of the industry and there are certain personalities who will say and do anything to mess with us so I wouldn't be surprised if somebody said something to Pixologic.

That's pretty nice. I'd add some secondary motion to the smaller hair strands.

Shhh...don't tell anyone... I have the source code to Reelmotion. Rick Baltman gave the whole thing to me a while back and I planned to resurrect it. Now if I could only clone myself or become independently wealthy very quickly, I might actually have time to work on hobby projects like that.

That's all well and good in theory but you always lose something in translation with 3D stuff. If someone wants to dig up the latest RealFlow file formats, I'll take a look.

More recent versions of the FBX SDK supports Collada which is potentially very cool. At some point, we'll need somebody to provide some Collada test files to play with. But here's where life gets interesting. The version of FBX currently in EI goes back to 2005. Over the weekend I tried dropping in the most recent version from earlier this year. There are over 130 compile errors and most of them sound like "No such function exists" or "such-and-such is undefined". That means Autodesk made major changes to FBX in the past five years so there is a lot of work to be done and that's just to get what we had working again. Exporting is a big unknown at this point. There are many aspects to consider. Think about all the things you can have in a project. If memory serves, dealing with heirarchies was the biggest pain to implement. A project like this could take several months if you had a dedicated person working on it AND plenty of people to really test it.

It's possible that it's a sequence-of-actions problem. Try posting the exact steps (don't assume anything).