Danford

alright this is really an incredibly useful step by step you've put together. To get the renders to look like yours as soon as you start to use photons I had to delete and create a new photon map file almost every time. It's the first time I use photons though... I am simply amazed at the last step, the light customization and bounces customization graphs, and how important this part is to get that GI look I see in some people's work. I'm glad I know now how to get to this point. These graphs and the way you can push and pull light and colors is news to me and I love the graph interface (much better than punching numbers). I can see how you'd learn to change the look of the lighting just by the shape of the graph (with a lot of practise of course) I dont know to what extent but the render times seem much better than anything Ive ever done with GI before, at various sizes Ive just tested (still testing right now and will continue tomorrow) Great stuff Tom.

Wow, lots of stuff to go through. That last snapshot looks beautiful, hard to believe it comes from my file... :) Thanks so much Tom. I'll get back to you when I go over everything.

Thanks Tomas. Just a room with a light. What I usually do is just turn GI on and since it tends to look good right away, I just move the light around till I'm happy and that's it. Really wanting to learn how it works though. Thanks for offering to help, and no hurries, I'm probably not the only one who's confused about some of the advanced rendering settings in v8. Archive.zip

Thanks, I sure wish I had bought them when I had the chance. Thanks Tomas. Ians's tutorials are great and a pleasure to watch. The tutorials on photons and the v8 features however, I really don't understand anything of what he's talking about, which is probably entirely my fault, definitely not Ian's. I have done many small projects with EIv8 GI turned on at pretty much default settings, and although I find the rendering times very long, it looks great, but when you decide to dive a little deeper on the settings, on how to optimize render times, and what the buttons and settings do, I find that there is simply not enough info. Anywhere. This is frustrating but I, like everyone else here, love this software. I have used it for many years, but never heavily, that's its strongest point, how easy it is to use, up until many of these new features were added, that is. One last thing I wanted to ask, is there any other software or rendering program whose GI system is like EI's? I could try learning about GI that way... Thanks.

Nice work. I agree with this though. I find photons and the GI system really confusing and complicated to learn, as if it had been just sort of thrown on top of what was already there. I had to do something very quickly a few weeks a go, kind of like what the OP did and clearly I wasnt ready cause I became so confused with the different options and the explanations in the manual that I ended up using Lightrig, cause that's what I know. I came sort of close to what I wanted, but it would have taken forever to render. I even went online looking for info on the Montecarlo GI system mentioned in the manual to understand the system better but there is literally no info on it. I remember there were some training DVD's on GI and photons somewhere, for EIAS. Does anyone know what happened to those and where they can be bought?

oh dear... I only found out about this yesterday, the offer to get PPPro at half price. I sent an email to support@tripledtools asking to purchase the plugin but have heard no reply. Please please please don't tell me I'm too late for this...

Hi apu. Have you tried command option clicking on the blue handle, not on the keyframe. That works for me. I can comm+Opt click on the blue handle to break the curve, and comm+Opt click again back to smooth. Command clicking alone seems to do something also, not sure what exactly, but it feels very uncontrollable.

I'm getting some file not found errors but that's fine. I have some good info to go by. I found your comment about referring to variables [frame -1] also very interesting: I had no idea about this and I'm reading the manual info on it. Declaring variables (or string variables with the $ sign) and referring to them seems to be kind of awkward and convoluted in XP so I need to understand these concept first I think. I will post here on this thread if I run into other issues> I haven't started the project yet.

thanks. For loops work yes but I could never get them to work with what I wanted, like I wrote above, although, this was in the XP that came with v 5.5 with the for loop we have passed 1 variable, the counter variable, x (whatBug). There are still 4 variables (movement_X, movement_Y, amplitude, rate) that need to be passed so, is this where you would use a container null? I assume you would make a new null for each bug and fill the x y and z position with data?

Thanks so much again for offering to help. If XP supported custom functions I'd write something like this: function bugMove(whatBug, movement_X, movement_Y, amplitude, rate){ "Bug_"+ whatBug.XPosition = movement_X; "Bug_"+ whatBug.YPosition = movement_Y; "Bug_"+ whatBug.ZPosition = amplitude*cos(rate*time); } bugMove("01", 35,27, 120, 80); bugMove("02", 20,34, 100, 50); What approach would you take here? cause imagine a few dozen bugs, maybe a hundred of them. Just think of the headache writing all the code for every single one of them...

Thanks Cj. No "function(){}" syntax then. Good to know. I thought I was doing something wrong... because, what scripting environment doesn't allow for custom functions? What I'm trying to do: I'm trying to reuse code I wrote in flash (actionscript 2) for a cartoon bug animation that came out nicely. To get the same moves and that same 2D animation feel that I liked, I was thinking I cpuld do it in EIAS 8 and XP, just not cartoon like this time. In flash (this was years ago) I wrote a simple function to animate the various parts of one bug. the function controlled the movements, placement and colors of the bug. Just a few expressions, or lines of code. I then reused this function, and passed it parameters to basically animate the rest of the bugs, there were a lot of them, and the result was nice and random, all the bugs behaving differently. of course trying to write functions gave me errors. I have also tried using "for" loops but I also get errors when I combine it with custom variables. The for loops was in an old version of XP though, EIAS 5.5 XP I think, and this was for another project, similar though, and I ended up using an instance of XP for each "bug" and it was just a nightmare to keep track of. Using nulls (I sometimes use the XP group itself) to store values is something I've done also. But what if you plan on doing something a bit more involved with maybe a few dozen objects?

Hi. Can you write custom functions in the latest XP? If so what is the correct syntax? I always get errors when trying to write a function like in javascript, for example, and I'm beginning to think I'm missing something really obvious somewhere? If not, how do people organize and reuse code? multiple instances of XP? Is the custom channel functionality in XP (which I've never used) something that could be useful here? Thanks