Tried and Failed v2.2

Started by Mr_Lamppost, November 28, 2010, 09:24:20 PM

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Mr_Lamppost

I know I harvest been active for the last year or so, loads of things competing for my time so was therefore delighted to see a notification of an update when I fired up TG today.  I had a look at the new features and am looking forward to trying them out. 

The first thing I tried however was importing an abject and rendering it with a shader employing power fractals.  To my amazement and total disappointment my object appeared a uniform colour.   I had been making extensive use of power fractals both as shaders in themselves of as modifiers to imported textures right up to build 2.1.18.1  when power fractals stopped working with imported objects. 

I had considered the ability to use procedural power fractals in the materials of imported objects fundamental to an application which is be its very nature procedural. 

I am sure I mentioned this around the release of build 2.1.18.1 and was expecting it to be addressed in any update.  My assumption is that the problem lies in the assumed Get Position used by the power fractal shader.  I can still as in all previous builds create a procedural shader manually using function nodes starting from a Get Position.  But it takes a lot of nodes to even come close to the subtle variations possible with the use of a power fractal. 

Thoughts; work arounds?`
Smoke me a kipper I'll be back for breakfast.

freelancah

Hmm...were you rendering with raytracing on?

Henry Blewer

Dune uses power fractals with objects very often. I have on some of my render also; never had any difficulty.

Could it be the object format? There are many variants of Wavefront's obj object format. Which modeler are you exporting from?

By the way, Welcome back! 8) :)
http://flickr.com/photos/njeneb/
Forget Tuesday; It's just Monday spelled with a T

Dune

It still works for me. PF's for variation per object, and lately get position and some perlin 3D, which works across the population.

j meyer

Hi Mr_L,
that was a problem in the last version actually,did some tests yesterday after
reading your post and in TG2.2 everything was working like it should (with a
non UV object).
A work around i had success with in 21181 was to use surface layers with a
PF as mask (1 PF per layer) before or after the parts shader,iirc.
Hope you'll find a solution,good luck!

Mr_Lamppost

OK hands up it was my hasty test and I wasn't as clear as I could have been.

PF positions were read correctly in version 2.1.18.1 when the micro polygon rendererr was used so the problem only existed if objects were ray traced.  I made further tests last night and yes everything is working correctly in version 2.2. Except that is for the one object I used for my quick test.  This object is rendering the PF but a vastly increased scale so that the variation is not visible.  I have no idea what is causing this, the object originated in 3DS-Max and was exported via a .3ds file. I have now taken the object into both Blender and PoseRay, as far as I know all transformations have been permanently applied to the geometry and then reset and the power fractal is still rendering at an increased scale.

It was just dumb luck that I made a quick test using a broken object :(  I have now spent too much time on this when there are new cloud controls to investigate.

Smoke me a kipper I'll be back for breakfast.