This is not really related to TG2, but I just wanted to pass on this link.. (grabbed from http://rendering.ru/)
http://rapidshare.com/files/206755630/VD_HD.wmv
It's a pretty awesome demonstration of what is possible with the 3dsmax plugin - Vray Scatter..
Rendering time 1-3 hours per frame wih motion blur in HD 720 resolution.
Polygons:
Trees 175 000 by 2 000 000 polygon per tree.
Bushes - 30 000 by 500 000 polygon per bush
Flowers - 200 000 by 5000 polygon per flower
Grass 10 000 000 by 1000 polygon per grass
Entire 376 000 000 000 polygons
Regards,
Martin
If it isn't about TG2, it would be better for this to go in Open Discussions.
VRay is GREAT.
Pointless in any case...seems a dud link.. ...
On youtube you can find an old demo reel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cET7jx1t5vU (watch it in High quality).
For sure, this reel and the renders on the producer side are something the delusional Vue management should think about before laying out grandiose plans about separating the artist and professional lines (in other words, first check to HAVE a professional line...).
Bye...
P.S.: in addition, they might also check Kerkythea, Podium, FryRender, Maxwell Render, LuxRender, Brazil (for sure, I have left some products out of the list).
someone showed this a couple of weeks ago ???
Yes, very nice looking stuff for sure. Instancing has been around for a long time and impressive demonstrations have been plentiful for some time actually. I'd say this is one of the more impressive I've ever seen. What remains unknown to me however is whether Vray can handle complex terrain-scale displacement. I know it handles displacement well in general, but whether it can do so at the level required for rendering entire terrains driven by displacement, down to centimeter details, is something I'm very interested in.
- Oshyan
Thanks for moving the topic.. Ofc it should have been in open discussion to begin with - my apologies..
Martin
Thanx for getting the link working if in fact it was something screwy...might have been the net not cooperating..very interesting and it brings to mind the query that sometimes pops into my head...is TG2 ever going to have real physics ie: wind effect on vegetation. As I can't yet afford the animation version of TG2 this hasn't yet been a concern, but in the fullness of time I will own the full product and this is an important animation feature. Vue's implementation seems not too shabby and as Vue is way cheaper than Max I'm guessing that if we (TG2 USERS) don't get it in TG2, could Vue be far behind in my wish list. Since TG2 came around I rarely even think of Vue anymore but this topic did reassert it in my brain.. ...
Bobby, do you know this is the month Planetside is planning to release the Gold 2.0 version of TG2? The official release will probably follow with a rate hike.
Quote from: bobbystahr on March 09, 2009, 11:00:59 AM
...but in the fullness of time I will own the full product and this is an important animation feature.
Yeah I heard that with a certain amount of despair Calico...sigh...I would that I didn't have a falling apart house to consider...I'd already have Deep were it not for that continuing Money Pit....sigh...I'm guessing it'll be even a longer while now if the price is gonna pop up to industry standard pricing......oh well....I might have bit the bullet had there been an announcement of unlimited shaders on imported objects but that lack still is inhibiting me from really using TG2 as I'd like to.. ...
As far as I know Vue doesn't natively come with a generalized physics system either. It has "wind" effects, but it's really just a model warping effect as far as I know. There is some kind of plugin/script system called VueDynamics that does physics, but it's from a 3rd party.
In any case TG2 isn't likely to have physics any time soon. It's a complex area and largely outside the immediate focus of landscape modeling and rendering. I'd love to see it as a plugin in the future though.
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on March 10, 2009, 01:54:25 AM
As far as I know Vue doesn't natively come with a generalized physics system either. It has "wind" effects, but it's really just a model warping effect as far as I know.
Vue wind effects apply only to Solid Growth plants. Obviously, you could write a truckload of Python code to create a physics engine... exactly the way you can level a hill with a spoon.
Dear Oshyan, the two things that cripple TG2 are the limit on the number of shaders on meshes and the fact that you cannot create blocks of nodes as "macros" in order to manage the complexity of the network. To give the idea of what should be ideal, do have a look at World Machine macros: you package subnetworks into a single node (therefore prodiving "subroutines" for your network) and then you can instanciate your macro many times or make it into a component to reusable in other networks.
Bye!!!
Yeah, I'm definitely very familiar with World Machine's approach and I agree, it's a great system to model after. It's very friendly to use yet very powerful. We definitely intend to address this as well as the shader limitation issue in the future.
- Oshyan
I found a better (both for quality and content) video of VRay and VRayScatter capabilities; the URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-wPRH9GMPU&fmt=18.
Bye!!!
Quote from: latego on March 16, 2009, 09:06:38 PM
I found a better (both for quality and content) video of VRay and VRayScatter capabilities; the URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-wPRH9GMPU&fmt=18.
Bye!!!
:o Why do I want to cry? :P
Quote from: Arandil on March 17, 2009, 02:28:11 PM
Quote from: latego on March 16, 2009, 09:06:38 PM
I found a better (both for quality and content) video of VRay and VRayScatter capabilities; the URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-wPRH9GMPU&fmt=18.
Bye!!!
:o Why do I want to cry? :P
I think that you would cry harder if you had to buy the "thing"; actually I found no stated cost of VRay (just contact info for resellers) so I assume that it is a 4 digit price tag (and the first digit is not 1 for sure...).
The reason for this information was to show that when E-On management talks of separating artist and professional product lines (implying that 7 Infinite/xStream is a high end product) they are just delusional: actual high end products perform feats you do not even dream to do in Vue.
Vue is a good landscaping solution but outside this area, it is nothing. It has no real modeling, its trees are simplicistic (compare Vue trees to Carrara or Bryce ones, not even mentioning xFrog plants), lacks fundamental functionalities for architectural rendering... I could go on. The reality is that ALL E-On products belong to the artist world, and they should be marketed accordingly.
Nothing prevents E-On (if they have the people and the money) to enter the high end rendering market, but they need to develop new tools adequate to the competition, not just hypnotize collectively themselves into thinking they have them already.
Bye!!!
latego, you are aware that Vue has been used for a few movies already, correct?
Quote from: calico on March 18, 2009, 01:25:18 PM
latego, you are aware that Vue has been used for a few movies already, correct?
Calico, it was used, but as a more of a base for matte paintings, rather than directly.
Quote from: moodflow on March 18, 2009, 06:20:21 PM
Quote from: calico on March 18, 2009, 01:25:18 PM
latego, you are aware that Vue has been used for a few movies already, correct?
Calico, it was used, but as a more of a base for matte paintings, rather than directly.
Exactly. BASIS for MATTE PAINTINGS. In other words, not able to perform completely by itself a "simple" task (or at least, simple by Pixar/Dreamworks/ILM standards...).
Nowadays, GC movies have reached such levels of sofistication and complexity that Hollywood needs are to architectural rendering needs as these are to some "chrome spheres on a checkerboard" (which shows how many years I have spent dabbling with CG, starting in 1997 with POV-Ray 3.5).
There is a great publication here in Italy, called "Computer Grafica" (www.imagonet.it). They also include content from CineFEX (http://www.cinefex.com/) so I can get some information about movie making challenges, tools and workflow.
E.g., I read that in some scenes of "Happy Feet" there were 700,000 (not a typo) individually animated penguins, controlled by a software called Massive, which has been used also for Lord of the Rings mass combat scenes and 300 and many other titles. Just think about having not 700,000 replicated trees (using proxies) but 700,000 complex, animated meshes with bones, EACH acting indipendently and interacting with the surrounding meshes... this is an example of what they can do in Hollywood (and an example of what they need).
Another problem with movies is that in that field people use Renderman engines, which follow quite a different philosophy from programs like Vue (or TG). You create, rig and animate meshes with apps like Maya/XSI/Lightwave etc, then export the results to a format which can be digested by these engines and render. Shaders are not a graph of nodes... they are actual programs, written in Renderman Shading Language (now you know what that .rsl file extension means) which describe how to compute the resulting image. Just an example: in Vue or TG, antialiasing is nothing more than selecting some rendering options. In Renderman shaders, you have to code by hand the band limited approximations of your shaders in order to prevent moire patterns! There are whole books (and whole careers) about Renderman technology. All these techniques do not mesh at all with the rendering process of the programs we are talking about. Even doing matte paint is not a simple "well will add this scene as a background in post production" because foreground objects rendering interacts with the background (and vice versa).
Vue is a good landscaping application. You can get quite easily decent results with it (and if you master it, even more than just decent) but, obviously, it has its limit. Terragen 2, if provided with some more capabilities (and complemented with xFrog vegetation), can be a real competitor to Vue. As I alredy wrote in other posts, a sensible Vue user is the best fan of TG2!
Bye!!!
P.S.: better imported mesh handling (the horse bones keep being hitten) and a way to manage the whole rendering network in a more localized way (e.g. in Vue, when editing the graph which computes the procedural terrain you do not even see the graph which creates the density of the clouds, which is in its turn completely ignorable when editing the graph which control ecosystem density).
Massive was designed as I understand it in its original intent as you say, to deal with the combat scenes in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy of Motion Pictures after the production of which Massive Software was founded to bring Massive to the wider CGI community and has been used in a number of Motion Pictures since that time.
As to software been based on the Photo-Realistic Renderman specification and there are a number of them, these are dedicated Renders and that is what they are solely meant to do. Whereas Terragen and Vue fall in to the category of Digital Asset Creation (DAC) with rendering capabilities; these are a different class of application to the dedicated Render class of Application such as V-Ray, Renderman and Brazil R/S.
There is a vary good reason why there is such a thing as Multi-Pass Rendering, it is so that different aspects of a scene can be combined at the compositing stage later, Terragen will as I understand it get this in future.
Look, Terragen will get more features over time and it will be driven in the direction it needs to go [As I have pointed out time and again on these forums] at the same time it would be best to do so in a steady manor; not time to market which adds to an already complex development cycle and introduces the chances of error, just ask Microsoft if you don't believe it!
Above all it shouldn't really be about the software you use, but more about the user experience with that software; you can have all the features you like, but at the end of the day what is the interface like to use: if the user feels drained and cranky at the end of the working day then the software has failed the user experience test and that is really what its all about.
;D
Regards to you.
Cyber-Angel
Well said Cyber-Angel...as Mike H from Imagine3D was so fond of saying...."It ain't the tool it's the artist that makes the difference"...no matter how powerful the software, if y' ain't creative you're going to turn out mediocre work no matter what you use [look over a Poser gallery sometime and you'll fine one great image out of ten at best and they all use the same software]...and yes...TG2 leaves me elated with what I've managed to pull of with it at the end of day or project...sometimes I can't even sleep after a great [for me] session.. ...
That Massive software is really great.
I once found a cracked version of it (which is really a stupid thing to share as you pay thousands of dollars for the software). I decided to check it out to see how it works.
I needed a lot of tutorials before I understood what it did and didn't do, but basically you can create a figure, assign basic movement like walking, then set the amount of individual figures with individual textures, set where and how they should walk in the environment, and then the software creates these massive amounts of random figures, all behaving to the set standards.
In Lord of the Rings the software had a bug they left in.
In some battles individual units would run away from a battlefield, in stead of running towards it as they were set to do.
As this added to realism ("Run you wussy Orcs!!!") they left it in.
Obviously I didn't have all the other needed software like renderman, or the skills needed to figure everything out, to really create a scene or something. I did think about how I could use it for my Dogs of War scene, but got stuck on importing the soldier object...
It shows that it's a lot of work, but I think I could have used Terragen in the mix if I ever got it to work, albeit only for backgrounds to render over.
Really? From what I saw, it was used just like TG2 was used - backgrounds and it's my understanding it's what most of the big studios have used.
Quote from: moodflow on March 18, 2009, 06:20:21 PM
Calico, it was used, but as a more of a base for matte paintings, rather than directly.
The only "big" studio I know of that uses it is ILM. They've used it on 4 projects, 2 Pirates movies, Spiderwick Chronicles, and the latest Indiana Jones. But they seem to have a special relationship with ILM in that E-on worked with them on development of Vue 6 (and probably 7) and ILM got early access to a lot of things important to their pipeline. The only other major film use I'm aware of is their latest showcase on "Australia" (the movie), but the work is not done by what I'd call a "big" studio: http://www.e-onsoftware.com/showcase/spotlights/?page=1
You can see the other major uses of Vue there on their own Showcases page. We've got lots of work to do on our own similar page to make it current with some of the more recent and exciting uses of TG2.
- Oshyan
Quote from: calico on March 19, 2009, 08:46:54 AM
Really? From what I saw, it was used just like TG2 was used - backgrounds and it's my understanding it's what most of the big studios have used.
Quote from: moodflow on March 18, 2009, 06:20:21 PM
Calico, it was used, but as a more of a base for matte paintings, rather than directly.
Quote from: Oshyan on March 19, 2009, 10:14:25 PM
You can see the other major uses of Vue there on their own Showcases page. We've got lots of work to do on our own similar page to make it current with some of the more recent and exciting uses of TG2.
- Oshyan
Some stuff we don't know about yet? Can you tell something about this or do we have to wait for the new site to be on air? ;)
Martin
I think TG2 was used in an episode of House MD...
It starts with a fighter pilot flying around in a very TG2-like environment.
Yeah I've seen that one already, but Oshyan was talking about exciting use of TG2 and that stuff from House MD was really really crap. IMHO.
Quote from: bobbystahr on March 19, 2009, 01:29:09 AM
...sometimes I can't even sleep after a great [for me] session.. ...
Now that's what I'm talking about! 8)
Quote from: moodflow on March 20, 2009, 03:31:24 PM
Quote from: bobbystahr on March 19, 2009, 01:29:09 AM
...sometimes I can't even sleep after a great [for me] session.. ...
Now that's what I'm talking about! 8)
Indeed...I am an inveterate explorer and new discoveries make me really high..sometimes it keeps me up days on minimal caffine, heh heh heh, but mostly the discovery. I remember first coming to grips with modeling in Imagine3D...I swear I didn't sleep except when the Amiga was rendering...which it would sometimes do for days...LOL...TG2 is blazingly fast compared to those memories.. ...
Can't wait.
Quote from: Oshyan on March 19, 2009, 10:14:25 PM
We've got lots of work to do on our own similar page to make it current with some of the more recent and exciting uses of TG2.
- Oshyan
You guys probably know about many of the examples I'm talking about. They are generally not as notable as for example Pirates of the Caribbean, more comparable to the limited use of Vue in say Spiderwick Chronicles. But we're also talking about a pre-release product, with 0 marketing (TG2) compared to a product with a few generations of "professional" SKU's, and a fair amount of marketing and evangelism (Vue). We've got some catch up to do, but considering that what we have thus far is entirely organic, I think it's pretty impressive.
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on March 21, 2009, 12:52:22 AM
but considering that what we have thus far is entirely organic, I think it's pretty impressive.
- Oshyan
No arguments from me for sure..it's an interesting Journey.. ...
Hi latego,
Quote from: latego on March 18, 2009, 08:26:34 PM
Another problem with movies is that in that field people use Renderman engines, which follow quite a different philosophy from programs like Vue (or TG). You create, rig and animate meshes with apps like Maya/XSI/Lightwave etc, then export the results to a format which can be digested by these engines and render. Shaders are not a graph of nodes... they are actual programs, written in Renderman Shading Language (now you know what that .rsl file extension means) which describe how to compute the resulting image.
Shaders are not that different in TG2, you're just viewing them differently. When you create something with the function nodes (and other nodes, but particularly with function nodes) you are basically graphically programming the shaders. The difference is that the node network is visual programming as opposed to having to type them. There are also visual shader programming tools for Renderman, Pixar have Slim for example:
https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/slim.html
I've implemented a few RenderMan shaders in TG2 using function nodes. Nothing fancy, just brick patterns and stuff like that.
When we are able to add scripting support ( or an SDK! ) to TG2 you'll be able to write shaders in a text editor too, just like a RenderMan shader. Each approach has it's benefits. Visual programming is great for getting rapid feedback and prototyping shaders. When I was writing WaterWorks for TG v0.9 I was hanging out for some sort of visual programming, especially because I find it helps me to see things. I ended up writing a bunch of Java applets to preview certain functions, to visualise what changes in parameter values would do. With some improvements ( being able to change the origin of shader previews for example ) TG2 will make that even easier. For more complex shaders it can be easier to write them, particularly when you're doing a lot of maths and such. Much quicker to type "c = a + b" rather than set up nodes for it.
The Renderman shader compiler probably ends up turning the shader into something very much like a graph of nodes during compilation anyway ;-).
QuoteJust an example: in Vue or TG, antialiasing is nothing more than selecting some rendering options. In Renderman shaders, you have to code by hand the band limited approximations of your shaders in order to prevent moire patterns!
You still have to be careful about aliasing when creating shaders using the function nodes. TG2's antialiasing can cover up a lot of sins, but you'll still get better results if you make some effort to avoid aliasing. Anyway, I'm sure RenderMan renderers all have the same sorts of antialiasing options.
Programming shaders in RenderMan may be more sophisticated but you can do a lot of the same sort of stuff in TG2.
Regards,
Jo
Dear jo,
your last post is a checklist of nightmares for E-On ;D ; do what you wrote (an SDK letting people access TG shading innards) and Terragen will be on pair with the best engines around... may be I should really try out TG2 seriously (and not with 10 minutes doodles).
There is a point about visual programming tools (something that came to me when toying with the idea to create the n-th terrain generation app): how to you express a for loop? E.g. I want to sum 6 octaves of perlin noise; I know that you could create 6 perlin noise nodes and the required amount of adders but it is completely unweldy (and when you need 5 or 7 octaves you are back to the starting point). With a programming language of any time it is a trivial task to code compactly this function, but I haven't found a smart way of expressing it compactly with a node representation...
Bye!!!
Hi latego,
Quote from: latego on March 21, 2009, 01:04:28 PM
There is a point about visual programming tools (something that came to me when toying with the idea to create the n-th terrain generation app): how to you express a for loop? E.g. I want to sum 6 octaves of perlin noise; I know that you could create 6 perlin noise nodes and the required amount of adders but it is completely unweldy (and when you need 5 or 7 octaves you are back to the starting point). With a programming language of any time it is a trivial task to code compactly this function, but I haven't found a smart way of expressing it compactly with a node representation...
You're right of course. There are ways around it, and for simpler loops you can unroll them but it does become awkward quickly like you say. Theoretically I don't see why we couldn't have a loop node. Plenty of visual programming languages seem to have them.
Regards,
Jo