scott8933

Hello everyone, I've got a 1.3 gig .fbx file, but so far nothing's been able to open it. I've been told it originated in SoftImage (really? is it still 1997? anyway...), and so far I've tried Max, Maya 2011/OSX, Cinema/OSX, and of course EIAS/OSX. So far everything has either crashed or processed it for a long while then opened a blank scene. AFAIK there's no animation or rigging, but probably some very hi res textures and the model is most likely a crazy dense mesh. Looks like a single object though. Any ideas would be most appreciated! Thanks.

AE's stock mblur has gotten a little better over the years but is still pretty crappy for high blur settings. The TimeWarp filter does the same thing, its just a step-frame motion blur. You can get much better results in either by upping the sample steps, controlled with "Shutter Samples" in Timewarp and "Samples Per Frame" in the Advanced tab in Composition Settings. They look similar though slightly different (I actually see more banding with timewarp), doing it through Comp Settings renders far faster though. I have a feeling Timewarp is pretty old and unloved. FWIW there's also an mblur setting in the Transform effect, which will override your comp's blur value, though its also a step-frame blur and has no inter-frame setting.

Some plugins behave very strange with mblur, for example one of the Northern Lights plugs will have extreme blur coming from the center of the plugin group's coordinates - as if its taking every object and shooting it out into position for every frame. Don't remember which one, maybe Placer? (Also this might have been fixed at some point). The extreme blur settings have always been a way to get effects like the ultra-streaky/speedlines look, i.e. in The Mask when the main character spun-transformed into his Mask alter-ego. This works in After Effects as well, btw.

Given more time I'd like to have figured out the solution for the Lite build, since not everyone has the option to switch to the full version... and actually I like the easier-to-use Lite option panel. But as long as it works I'm happy. It seems like it would be easy to analyze since it was "random" (in time) but completely repeatable. Also, I forgot to mention but just remembered, the dropout was effecting all visible geo in the scene, not just one or two models, and I'll have to double check but I think it did it when I replaced a model with an Ubershape as a test. -Scott

Problem fixed by switching to the full version of NPR; I would have preferred to have figured out what was causing it, but no time. Things I tried that had no effect: -Change camera position and angle (slightly) -Change light setup (more lights, less lights, change light position, change intensity) -Change object's luminance, diffuse, specular -Change settings in NPRLight -Change frame rate from 24 to 48 -Change from Raytrace to Phong Every time, same result. Every 20 or so frames (at random, no pattern I could see) either all or some of the shaded area would not shade. Next frame it would come right back. Sometimes only half the frame would drop out, and it appeared to correspond to the bucket size but it was rendering too fast to be sure. Camera was moving very slowly, no sharp movements in the scene. When I changed to 48 fps, it dropped out at the same frames and occasionally the dropouts would extend for half a frame before or after. No more time spent troubleshooting.

I could understand (and fix!) if the problem were consistent, but the camera is moving very slowly across the scene, and the flashes appear out of nowhere for just a frame. Not always on the whole scene either, sometimes just the lower half. Might be related to the bucket size? I'm on a borrowed box with not much ram, I haven't actually changed Camera's stock memory settings. I tried a few things, changing lights, changing the camera angle slightly, etc. It always pops at the same frames. Solution 2, I tried doubling the frame rate (if nothing else I can frame blend the shadows with this pass and minimize the flashes) and it still did it during the same frames. Again sometimes the lower half only.

Hello everyone, I'm using the NPR shader to do an outline render, it has a little bit of solid shading on the edges of the objects right now, which is fine except that it flickers throughout the animation. Flickers, as in parts of it (in strips, inconsistently) will just drop out for a frame then reappear as normal in the next frame. I can probably blend it out in AE, but I'd rather have it render correctly in the first place. Anyone know the cause and solution? The attached files show the correct frame in all black and the next frame with a portion dropped out, highlighted in red. Thanks.

I'd actually bet that the old 1.0 interface looked a lot like the 1.5 interface (which was the first version I used), which honestly looked pretty much like the same one we have today. It hasn't really changed a whole lot, other than more "polish" and many more features. A couple years back I found a version of Photoshop 1.0 and was able to run it - guess this was pre OSX - and was surprised to see that it looked very much like the same Photoshop we use today. Just with fewer buttons. (not my screengrab, just a GIS) Though when I moved into a new office, we did have some pretty old apps including this gem:

Back when I worked at ABC On-Air Promo, they had a copy of the docs for a pre-1.0 version of EIAS. I don't recall if it was referred to as "Spotlight" still (don't think so), but they were just xeroxes that were spiral bound. Never saw the install disks for them, by then we were using a newer version so the docs were just filed away. In the Paintbox room, of course. That room was always literally and figuratively dark. The Paintbox hadn't been used in a few years and just sat idle, though turned on. Its control was downstairs in the machine room (nothing was ever turned off down there). At the time we were still running a Harry, so the Paintbox was redundant so to speak. 3D was mostly done in a different office where they were running Prisims and SoftImage. None of the designers besides me did any desktop based 3D, since the full-time 3D guys were really top notch and their SGI's (Indigo and something else I forgot) were comparatively faster. The ADB dongle had a very low serial number, under 100 as I recall. I thought about keeping the docs just for posterities' sake, but they were really more of a curiosity than anything else. The EIAS manuals were notoriously uninformative back then and these were no exception - just much shorter. This seemed pretty typical though for CGI at the time. Once we upgraded the Harry to a Henry, we got new manuals for it which were only about an inch thick. This, for a machine that cost upwards of $1mil at the time ($500k for the Quantel, and another $500 for the D1 you had to hook it up to, though it would work with most any kind of tape deck.) I sure did hate those D1's - they rarely worked right, having some 20 heads that had to stay aligned - so half the time you'd have this really expensive piece of media that could only be read back by the machine that wrote to it in the first place. But ABC kept really good libraries and records of their stuff and there was an entire room with several hundred D1's, along with 1" tapes and what not. All useless and unreadable less than 10 years later - millions of dollars of hardware and artwork, all basically scrap. Wait, what was the topic of this thread again...? Something about iffy career choices, I think.

Minning also makes a companion plugin for doing toon shading: http://www.minning.de/software/celulight I haven't used it, but have used Normality with much success in the past.

Having just finished up something vaguely similar to this, I'd say you may want to try rendering in layers and creating the look in post. The project I was working on needed to have that Sin City hi-con look, but technically this has similar problems. Doing it in-camera is going to lead to crawling/boiling/etc. Our solution, not the best, but it worked - everything was rendered as passes with a fairly simple color and shading palette, then the Maya guys had a script worked out that would render matte passes for all the parts we needed to effect differently (if necessary). This allowed for a ton of control in AfterEffects, both scene-wide, and then on a part-by-part level by using the mattes. There are plenty of good techniques to get various looks in post. We were mainly just using levels and curves to hicon things selectively. One of the guys on the project had actually worked as a lighter/comper on Sin City, and he described some of their techniques - lots of projection mapping onto geometry. This worked quite well, and could work for your project too. Requires more prep, but I think ends up with a simpler pipeline.

I haven't ever had time to really dive into the photon features of EI, but as a compositor I've been getting AO passes from Maya for quite some time - they usually do a pretty nice job of faking GI, sometimes even contact shadows - though they tend to be pretty noisy, sometimes bad enough that a secondary filter is needed to kill the inter-frame buzz they make. How does EI's Photon method differ? Better quality? Slower or faster? Used for different applications? The "maya" method is to dump several passes into the comper's lap and adjust from there. It has its advantages and disadvantages of course. I'm just wondering if the EI Photon process would be able to compete (hopefully exceed!) a Maya AO pass for fast faking of GI. Or do I have it wrong in its purpose?

A good game card will work perfectly with EI, you can get a nice nVidia one for $150 or so that will have dual DVI out and about 1gig ram onboard. ATI cards have traditionally not been as compatible, though I've got an HP that came with one that ran just fine... before I replaced it with a GeForce. The higher-end Quadros and Fire cards are a major hassle to run, I found a previous system became less stable when I switched from a top-of-the-line game card to a high-end Quadro. With the workstation cards you have to be much more careful about which drivers you're running. Everything gets much more finicky. I noticed no difference at all in After Effects, btw. I was able to turn on more effects in the OGL prefs, but previews and scrubs were just as atrocious as ever when using OGL Preview modes. With a good game card, you can still turn on AA settings on an app-by-app basis - so you can still get better looking views to some extent.

Well, at least in the post side we have more options than ever; Illusion has been made into an AE plugin, and Particular has been ported to Nuke. Any news on Northern Lights? Blair, you're kind of the Last Man Standing.

http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/articles/2010/11/03/167/mari-11-on-windows-is-released/ Not quite the Photoshop killer I'd been hoping for - its very much tied to a 3D texturemapping workflow. I didn't play with it too much yet, but it seems to insist on importing an .obj before it will even do anything. So; great new texture map tool out there! But unfortunately, those of us who are still looking for an alternative to PSD for general painting may still need to keep looking. Anyway, looks like a great tmap application and the price is great. Mac port coming soon...