thoughts of upcoming stuff

Even if i dont do any updates here on the blog i didnt gave up on this project. Mostly i’m waiting for the new Fusion7 release.

I’m a little afraid of this one, because Eyeon is building a completly new internal 3D system. which, i think, will break compatibililty with older plugins. this would lead into rebuilding everything from the start.

but i have to see what happens when Fusion7 arives.

 

on the other side i thinking about changing the code to become a PRMan (=Pixar Renderman) bridge.

Pixar announced that the upcoming release of PRMan will be free for non-commercial work and a single licences will be only around 500USD.

 

lets see what comes in the next couple of month

a new version release

this is mainly a bugfix release, no fancy new stuff in here

• Fixed a major Bug with concatination of transformations
• Improved formating when exporting RIB
• Included „ROE_PartioLoader“, which lets you render Partio particle caches as Renderman procedural
via Partio43delight from Michal Fratczak
(https://bitbucket.org/mfratczak/partio43delight/overview)
• Other small fixes and improvements

 

only 64bit version from now on

 

download

New Tool for Eyeon Fusion

After the small preview i will now share the first release of my new tool for eyeon fusion: Partio Viewer

* you can import all formats Partio supports
* you have a slider to load only every Nth particle (to speed up the viewer with really huge caches, but the overall speed is great)
* cache sequences work with the “hack” from here
* you can crash your fusion really often

some general tipps:
* try first to view the “Partio viewer” node befor you do something else
* if you attach a material to it, it will use the color of the material. but change the color of the material before you attach it to the node
* more then one “partio viewer” node active in a scene is not adviced
* using cache sequences is also very unstable
* the points itself will not react to lights in the scene
* loading huge caches can take some time

for the future i try to get done:
* per particle color
* make it more stable
* find why there is no interaction with lights
* what you suggest
* in the next release of my 3Delight render plugin there will be a new node to render the Partio files directly with 3delight

download the plugin

dowload a sample scene with the particle cache from the screenshot

PartIO

Because Michal Fratczak build some time ago a procedural primitive to load and render particle caches with 3delight i started to play around with it and got it implemented in my plugin.

but because its no fun to work with something you cant see, i started to code a node which reads the particle cache and displays the particles in the OpenGl viewport. this is now in a very early stage but it does basicly what it should.

(this shows the viewport particles and a render from fusions internal OpenGl render, therefor the Replicate3d node)

the rendering via the 3delight procedural is really fast and looks like this:

maybe next time i got it more stable and with some more options, so you can play around with it

Fusion GUI Theme

Eyeon released Fusion 6 in 2009 and back then there was this glossy buttons style state of the art. now, in 2013, this aint so new anymore. therefore i create a little more modern GUI theme for Fusion.

Its a “flat” shaded theme.

 

you can download the theme here 

then unzip the file into your fusion/Skins directory

if you find some errors or missing buttons just drop me a line or fix them by yourself

something for the holidays

here is the new release! so you can play with it over the coming holidays.

because this is a big step in the development i guess it will have some major bugs or flaws. I changed a lot of stuff to work with the latest version of 3delight. 3Delight V11 added a new path tracer to the raytracing engine and this is a highly optimized raytracer. this means it will greatly improve the speed in raytracing.

go to 3deligth.com and grab the latest release version (the free one will now use 4 render threads). if you already had 3delight 10 installed please check if you enviroment variables point to the correct folder for 3delight11.

after that delete all old stuff from my plugin and now you can install the new release. if you need you old comp setups with my plugin, you must keep it somewhere around.

the new version will break backwards compatibilty and older comps are not renderable anymore!!!

this release brings a new “advanced material” to you. this material can replicate most of the materials you see in real life, it replaces the former roe.cooktorrance material.

download

Changelog:

• Changed a lot of code to work with the new 3delight V11 release
• removed the former RoE.cooktorrance shader and replaced it with a new „Advanced material“
• new material is a „uber shader“ which can replicate most of the real world materials
• new material has seperate sample settings for the raytracing elements (reflection, refraction, GI)
• global sample setting still be used by all other stuff (lights, shadows, …)
• raytracing is now default render option
• fixed a lot of bugs (export to RIB now correct, removed wrong arguments from shaders, …)
• removed now unused settings from Render3d node
• complete new method for GI/Colorbleeding

more progress

you can see here another test render with the new “advanced material” shader, it has a newly written code for ColorBleeding, new self illuminated effects (incandescence), a texture input for reflection roughness and many other features.
i hope i can make a new release before christmas holidays