help with Dante

[interstellar]

Hi Everyone,

I finally bought a MacPro, installed EIAS v8 and installed the UB version of Dante. I made a project, attached a ubershape sphere to Dante and set Dante's parameters. When I hit the "Apply" button from within the Dante user interface, an error message appeared:

Command Interface Error: "Plug-in could not allocate needed memory. The socket reported that the available memory . . ."

Can anyone tell me what this means?

Thanks in advance,

Joe T

[scott8933]

Most of the NL plugins are pretty specific with how the attached groups need to be named - you had "autoname" turned off in uber, right?

I've used Dante with ubershape before, and it should work fine. It's safer to save out the ubershape as a baked model, but not totally mandatory.

Maybe post the project? Sounds like a simple thing to troubleshoot.

[interstellar]

Thanks for your suggestions. I exported an ubershape sphere, imported it into the project, attached it to Dante and I didn't get an error message. I've been using Dante for years in EIAS v6 and I never had to export/import ubershapes like this. Oh well, it's a small price to pay for having Dante!

Thanks again,

Joe T

[RichardJoly]

Congrats on your new toy Joe!

I hope you keep gracing us with your magnificent work. I'm away from V8 right now and, like Scott said, post your project with the Ubershape, we'll have a look at it for I don't remember having trouble with it. (Not that I can make it do what I want...)

In V8, when you export a group as .fac there is a checkbox at the bottom left of the Export window saying Re-import on export or something like that. It saves a couple mouse clicks...

Cheers!

[bwcc]

UB Dante is really buggy, I used it a lot in EIAS 6 on a PPC without issue. Since version 7 and the UB version was released it has been unusable. Even when you get it to work it will corrupt projects to the point where they won't open until you remove the plugin from the Sockets folder and delete the object. It will crash EIAS consistently and constantly get memory errors.

The worst part is that it won't work with Renderama at all.

Try Power Particles Pro. It's has some limitations compared to Dante, but at least it works.

brian

[interstellar]

UB Dante is really buggy, I used it a lot in EIAS 6 on a PPC without issue. Since version 7 and the UB version was released it has been unusable. Even when you get it to work it will corrupt projects to the point where they won't open until you remove the plugin from the Sockets folder and delete the object. It will crash EIAS consistently and constantly get memory errors.

The worst part is that it won't work with Renderama at all.

Try Power Particles Pro. It's has some limitations compared to Dante, but at least it works.

brian

Hi Brian,

Thank you for your suggestion; where can I find Power Particles Pro?

Richard, thank you for your nice comment on my work! I plan to push my new toy to its limits!

Joe T

[scott8933]

That's disappointing news; Dante was a pretty robust system before, and PPP was good but really not nearly as powerful as Dante.

Has Blair weighed in on the stability problems?

UB Dante is really buggy, I used it a lot in EIAS 6 on a PPC without issue. Since version 7 and the UB version was released it has been unusable. Even when you get it to work it will corrupt projects to the point where they won't open until you remove the plugin from the Sockets folder and delete the object. It will crash EIAS consistently and constantly get memory errors.

The worst part is that it won't work with Renderama at all.

Try Power Particles Pro. It's has some limitations compared to Dante, but at least it works.

brian

[RichardJoly]

Power Particle Pro:

http://www.tripledtools.com/PPPro/PPPro.htm

You will see in the examples that it seems to rely heavily on AG_Mondo Clouds for fire and smoke. I don't know if Power Particle Pro can do the same effects without it.

http://www.northernlights3d.com/AG_Shaders/agproducts.html

If anyone could post an example of PPP fire and smoke not using AG_Monto Clouds that would be great!

[bwcc]

That's disappointing news; Dante was a pretty robust system before, and PPP was good but really not nearly as powerful as Dante.

Has Blair weighed in on the stability problems?

It is disappointing and it has been disappointing for a long time. Dante is one of the best particle systems I have ever used in any application. Without it, EIAS is not nearly what it could be. When I bring up issues with any NL plug-in I get directed to NL. I think the people that ran NL have moved to other things. None of their plug-ins have been updated or fixed for at least 3-4 years.

Dante, and a few other plug-ins, should really be part of EIAS. It could be still sold as part of a premium package but it needs to be owned and maintained by EIAS. Since EIAS has taken over Konkeptoine the support has been very good. I have had a few problems with Konkeptoine plug-ins recently and they were fixed quickly and worked perfectly.

NL obviously has no intention of ever fixing, updating or improving any of their plug-ins. I own several NL plug-ins and would like to buy others, but I won't until I have at least some confidence of getting any level of support. EIAS has the incentive to fix the plug-ins and make sure they work. If NL can't support their plug-ins, EIAS and NL should be able to figure out some solution to keep them current and functional.

NL plug-ins add so much functionality to EIAS, without them EIAS becomes a much smaller app. As EIAS tries to improve and become more modern, I hope they don't have to limit improvements to ensure that 5 year old plug-ins will still work.

brian

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Brian,

Please, if you have a Bug report, please, do a simple project showing the problem, then we can reach Blair, Blair is always open to work with us.

Dante has a way to run the simulation in Animator and save all the particle data for every frame into a file. Of course since Rama knows nothing about third-party data files, the user has to copy that particle data file over to every slave and then instruct Dante to use that file during rendering. And that's if you only have one Dante group in the project. If you had 50, you'd have to do the same thing for all 50 groups.

So you can see that user error is highly likely to happen.

Thanks a lot

Tom

[bwcc]

I have done that at least a dozen times, It has been the same problem since version 7 was released (I think 2007). The PPC version of Dante worked fine, once the UB version was released it stopped working. I started sending bug reports to EITG once version 7 was released. EITG could reproduce the bug and NL could reproduce the bug. They both told me at time that it was a problem in version 7 and it was fixed in version 8. I waited until 8 was released and it was not fixed, I would say that in EI8 Dante was even more unstable and it still would not work in Renderama. After EI8 I sent more bug reports to EI and NL.

After the ownership change I was encouraged that there might be a chance of getting it fixed. I set up a file where the bug occurred and sent the bug report, everyone involved was able to reproduce the bug and nothing happened. The only solution I ever got was "don't use Renderama" which to me is not a solution.

From what I can tell, the error occurs because of a problem within Dante. Every time I bring it up, the only response I get from EI is contact NL. I have contacted NL several times with the same problem and have never gotten any realistic solution.

If you look through the bug reports on this forum I'm sure you can find the last one I sent.

thanks,

brian

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Brian,

Found your last thread and Bug project.

http://www.eias3d.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=77&page=1&highlight=Dante

I will send directly to Blair.

Thanks

Tom

[bwcc]

cool, thanks!

brian

[interstellar]

Hi Dante Users,

I set up a very simple project, using a single sphere attached to a single instance of Dante. The sphere was an ubershape sphere that I exported as a FACT object. I applied the Dante Cloud Shader to this sphere. I parented this sphere to Dante and, one-by-one, I began setting variables in Dante to simulate a plume of smoke. For example, I applied a "Billow Rotation" of 180 degrees per second to the particles. After each change was made in Dante, I rendered the project to verify that it did what I expected it to do. Finally, I checked the "Reactive Shader Compatible" box in the "Control Groups/General Settings" section of Dante. When the project was rendered, I saw that the Dante Cloud texture on the spheres ceased rotating with the spheres. When I clicked at various points in the Project Timeline, I could see the spheres rotating in the Camera Window, so Dante was rotating the spheres. The texture was simply not sticking to them once I checked the "Reactive Shader Compatible" box.

Is this a bug or did I not select something properly?

Thanks in advance,

Joe T

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Joe,

Could you provide this simple project to Blair?

Thanks

Tom

[interstellar]

Ola Joe,

Could you provide this simple project to Blair?

Thanks

Tom

Hi Tomas,

I'd be happy to - where should I send the project?

Joe T

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Joe,

Please, send to my email

tom@eias3d.com

Thanks

Tom

[interstellar]

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to set the record straight about the two problems I reported earlier in this thread. It turns out that neither of them was a problem with Dante after all; they were both "operator error" problems caused by me.

I can't address the Renderama issue raised by Brian. When I bought Dante seven years ago, I don't think it was modified to run on Renderama at that time so I have always run it on a single, "local" processor. I had always used Dante that way on my G5 and I'm using it that way now on my shiny, new Mac Pro.

Except for Camera running out of memory (which Blair has recently referred to in the General Forum), Dante has produced a nice flamey smoke trail for a meteor project I'm producing on my Mac Pro with EIAS v8.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Joe T