maher

Students of the Leningrad University in Russia had contacted me because they're doing a adaptation of a science-fiction novel from a well known Russian writer. They are on a thight budget for their project and they «borrowed» an auto-gyro Calidus like mine from a russian owner because it look like futuristic enough technology and could be used to do some ground scenes. They learned about my 3D model that I've modeled from Rhino 3D and rendered in EIAS for some painting tests and they ask me if they can use it for some 3D space scenes. I'm glad to share it with them if it can help, but since all texturing and lighting was done in EIAS, the Rhino file will only give them geometry. If they download the trial version of EIAS, will they be able to use my EIAS scenes (involving no plug-ins)? And what are the limitations of the trial version (other than the no plug-ins part) like limits in term of resolution or duration length for animations? Watermarking? Will I be able to open their tweaked files with my dongle protected version of EIAS if they need rendering horsepower or plug-ins add-on? This is clearly on a basic non-commercial purpose. No one is being paid for their contribution to this students project. Thanks, Maher

There's a limit to the number of pixels you need and it's your retina who defined it ;-) One of my university buddy, who's working at CAE, Montreal, was in charge of the best VR headset ever produced for their flight simulator. To prevent computing an unnecessary high definition picture for the whole field of view, they choose to draw a global 1024 x1024 pixels for the peripheral vision and by tracking in realtime the fovea of the subject, they recalculate on the fly a high definition portion of that global picture in 1024 x 1024, just for the yellow spot, the most sensitive portion of the retina for details. At the time, the prototype was able to achieve half the equivalent resolution of a human eye... They've made another prototype with the same resolution than the human vision but they dropped the project after 9/11 when the techno bubble bursted! I wasn't able to get a demo of the project because it's was classified military stuff. Maher

4K is on it's way very fast. TV sets are becoming cheaper, under the 1K$ mark and with HDMI 2.0 some can be used as computer screen with a decent refresh rate. Alas we will need faster machine to render those big pictures and the best video cards, like in the new MacPro. Apple could do a great move by launching a new MacPro model with dual CPUs (not necessarily Xeon class) and just one high-end video card. It will still fit the small form factor that seem so important to Sir Yves and it will be much better suited for 4K 3D jobs. Maher

I have a MacPro, early 2008, QuadCore 2 x 3,2 GHz. I was about to order one of those new MacPro, hoping that it will render much faster than my 6 years old machine, but I was waiting for some benchmarks before committing such serious money. But the few early reports I've read suggest that, if the new MacPro will be a real beast for HiRes video editing, rendering will only be twice as fast as my actual Mac, even for the costly top of the line model. I hardly believe that so few raw power improvement was made over a six years period. Sure, I'm comparing a 2 processors machine against a single CPU one, but at $10K for a full fledge top of the line new MacPro, I was hoping some better numbers. That make me appreciate even more all the great work the EIAS team had achieved in that time span, just on software! My exact same machine render much faster than 2X in EIAS 9.1, no hardware upgrade could have beat that for the price of a few upgrades ;-) Maher

The thing that I hate with the company is that the regular price is a real joke. Each week, I receive one or two promo codes offering me a discount of 10 to 30% on a particular product or on all of them. It's almost spam... And they don't have any consistency in their prices : buying a new license for a promo product is cheaper than going for an upgrade! Maher

Thanks Loon, I'm a bit rusty with that procedure and didn't had my dongle at work so I wasn't sure exactly how to describe the sequence. The live material checkbox synchronize the parent object and the master material, so any change on a linked object will reflect back to the MM. Unchecking the live material checkbox allow you to personalize the settings for a particular object, factually unlinking that object from updating the MM (not sure if the link is still preserve from MM to children objects…) Maher

A Master Material is a general setting reference. It doesn't know a thing about the objects it will be apply on because those objects will have different dimensions. Master Material are more useful for objects that doesn't use dimensions specific maps (scale, diffuse, bump, etc…) but share other general attributes like color, specular, general reflective and transparency aspects. You can however apply a Master Material to those similar objects and tweak, on an object basis, the dimensions specifics aspects as long as you don't apply those change back to the Master Material. Also, any dimension specific attribute of a MM (like diffuse or bump map) won't show up in an animation preview in an Animator windows. Maher

Great! And thanks for the 9.1 precision; my brain farted when I asked about the 8 version... Maher

Did anyone yet tested EIAS 8 on OS X 10.9 aka Maverick? Thanks, Maher

Hello Thomas, I've received yesterday a posting about the release of EIAS 9.1. While I love the new features of 9.1, it seem weird that an email came on 28 august for a press release date of june 25... Maher

Cool, so we have at least one robot and one Incredible hero to help us solve all our EIAS problems ;-) Maher

You can also export .SAT files, import it in EI Modeler if you have it and a computer that still can run it and reexport in FACT from there. It a tedious process but it was a path Paul Sherstobitoff told us because you get a FACT file much cleaner from Modeler (lot less polygons for the same quality). Maher

I also have a MacPro early 2008 and I'm very interested to learn how functional is your hack. Please, let us know about it when it will be done. Maher

Work okay now! Maher

Yes, that gyro brake my wallet for quite a while! I need to keep the decoration expense at a minimum. Since I never did a complex texture mapping job in EIAS, I learned a lot doing those tests. I have 4 textures mapped on over the other on the tail of my model. Maher

Another test. An auto-gyro without wings but with wings ;-) Maher http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl7ehWUdjcU

Please follow this link instead : Youtube ask me at the first importation if I want to correct a stability issue but it totally screw it when I answered yes... Maher

When I follow my own link on Youtube, I sometimes get a movie with a very weird wobbling camera travelling. Does anybody know why? Maher

Thanks Rick! I like your Bullet animation very much. Hope I could rig my gyro model so I can animate a take-off/landing animation. Maher

The past few days, I've played with modeling a 3D approximation of an Auto-gyro Calidus, in order to test some designs of paint/stripes jobs before committing on a final version. I used Rhino 3D for the modeling and Electric Image Animation System for the photorealistic rendering. This is a of my last test. For a 360 degree Full HD animation of this test, follow this link : Calidus Paint Test - YouTube Maher

Hello Tomas, I noticed that, in the irradiance tutorial file, the reflection on the sphere originate from the secondary GI ray settings and not on the photons map settings in the light used (GI only). In EIAS 8, it was recommended to get reflections and refractions from the photon maps by settings to GI and Secondary, because it was much faster than adding secondary rays in the global GI settings. Did something dramatically changed in the GI engine in EIAS 9? Maher

The few last days, I've played with Rhino 3D for Mac beta and EIAS 9. I've modeled a good approximation of my new white gyro for testing some stripping ideas before committing myself with a definitive design. I really love the speed and the quality of rendering of EIAS 9. It's so fast, I've done everything on my Macbook Pro without even bothering transferring the project on my MacPro. Here's a first proof of concept. Maher

Awsome! By the way, is there some kind of manual that explain the settings of the new features? I've downloaded all the tutorials of EIAS 9 and take a quick look at all of theme but I just see some detailed explanations in the Photons Lessons folder. I don't mind to play with the new features without a detailed manual, but I would like to know if old EIAS 8 projects will render the same in the new 9 release without any tweaking (especially for the photons and GI aspects) Thanks, Maher

Thomas, does that mean that with a render farm, you only need to add in Renderama one render engine per remote host and the camera on that host will use all the available core/thread on that host? That will be really great, since with the new accumulation of multicore CPU it is tedious and annoying job just launching in Renderama all those remote engine and on the remote launching all the remote slaves and organizing all the different render windows... Maher

Ola Thomas, I'm in last version of Safari (6.0.1) on a Mac. I figured that I had to choose a product first, then the system bring me to the «buy now» page. I've already purchase the upgrade and received my unlock link ;-) Now I'll need a few days of snow storm to forget about work and play with EIAS 9... Thanks, Maher