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I like doing element groups and lock different objects together so that if multiple objects end up in the same uv space I can simply select the object's number and get all it's associated uv's selected. The stuff to the bottom (element properties) is what I think you could use, but you might already use that trick. 
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Jul 1, 2015 19:45
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Hopefully a helpful tip. Once in a while, Studica sells full commercial licenses for ZBrush at a discount.
tango alpha delta fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Jul 2, 2015 |
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Jul 2, 2015 21:59
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Does V-Ray for Maya ever go on sale? I want to mess around with it but more than $1,000 is a little steep for that. I know there's a demo but that's also not particularly ideal.
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Jul 4, 2015 06:39
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Pathos posted:Does V-Ray for Maya ever go on sale? I want to mess around with it but more than $1,000 is a little steep for that. I know there's a demo but that's also not particularly ideal. At least the Maya demo is marginally usable unlike the Max version which actually resets all of its loving settings like every 5 minutes. Chaos Group don't really have a middle ground right now between crippled demo and full commercial license for V-Ray - they could definitely stand to add a non-commercial / learning edition to the roster. As for your original question, I just checked a reseller's site and saw V-Ray for Maya advertised as being on sale for $990 which is $50 off the usual price, so... that's probably the best you're going to get. You can always email Chaos Group and ask for an unrestricted evaluation version though.
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Jul 4, 2015 08:43
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Speaking of ChaosGroup. Why is adding particles to a foam set in Maya so confusing? I'm watching a tutorial on how to do it in Max and it seems simple (add Phoenix Source to Particle Sets). But in Maya, it brings up the goddamned confusing Relationship editor and I can't tell what to do. edit: Following this tutorial... around 8 minuts in is when he starts to talk about the particles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpYJOIVSUx4 edit 2: The manual says this: For each foam node, click the Edit Particle Systems button, and inside the Relationship Editor, select the Particle Systems set on the left, and the respective particle group of the simulator on the right (they must be called something like "PG_PhoenixFDSimulator_Foam_0" and "PG_PhoenixFDSimulator_Splashes_0").. Still can't figure it out or get it to work. I swear to god sometimes Maya's UI is so loving infuriating. It's clearly designed by engineers that are too in the weeds to see how unintuitive their poo poo can seem to others. It should be super easy to add a particle system to the Foam system (and it clearly is very easy in Max) but Maya goes out of it's way to make it impossible to even understand what you're trying to do. BonoMan fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Jul 4, 2015 |
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Jul 4, 2015 19:53
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It would probably take a complete rewrite to fix everything that's hosed up about Maya, but a good start would be unifying a lot of the obsolete and redundant interfaces it has - when was the last anyone used the freaking Hypergraph? The Hypershade / Node Editor integration is a good start, but it's still a mess. There's also the fact that Maya does everything possible to obfuscate the fact that it's really a node-based architecture, which is why you have people using it for the first time wondering what the gently caress the difference between the pCube, pCubeShape and polyCube tabs in their Attribute Editor is.
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Jul 4, 2015 22:58
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Maya has a transform node and a shape node for just about every piece of geometry. The transform node holds the xyz position info, the shape node has the general shape / geo info (tesselation etc) and any other nodes are attached to that (material node etc) - showing up as extra tabs in the attrib editor. This is not expressly clear, as it is in Houdini, but the hypergraph shows how they connect pretty well. Both Maya and Max have ways to look at the node based architecture, but a lot of artists prefer dealing with a viewport (menus and tabs) vs. a node network. Autodesk has made a greater push in that direction recently with the node editor but Houdini is still the best when it comes to 3d node based architecture. Nuke comes in a close second for node based compositing. Safe to say that most material editors are now node based (substance designer) and that is the way most CGI is going towards. There is simply more power being able to visualize how each node can connect to each other downstream, and upstream. Houdini has the added bonus in that, it is very nondestructive. Each node can be detached or reattached, at any given time and the workflow will update. There is a reason that Houdini artists pick up the work that Maya artists can't execute. Geaman: Can you elaborate on this? The part about removing shadows using IBL...? Gearman posted:Using IBL derived from HDRi's to remove shadows from photoscan albedos is truly, in every sense of the word, awesome. sigma 6 fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Jul 5, 2015 |
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Jul 5, 2015 01:25
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Can't post in the Phoenix FD problems thread over on Chaos Group because reasons apparently. I'm a registered user who has purchased both VRay and Phoenix FD, but I can only post in public thread because who knows the gently caress why. For having some pretty prominent products out there, ChaosGroup seems to be a cobbled together company at best. Ugh. VFX crunch time brings out the worst in me.
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Jul 5, 2015 02:25
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sigma 6 posted:Maya has a transform node and a shape node for just about every piece of geometry. The transform node holds the xyz position info, the shape node has the general shape / geo info (tesselation etc) and any other nodes are attached to that (material node etc) - showing up as extra tabs in the attrib editor. This is not expressly clear, as it is in Houdini, but the hypergraph shows how they connect pretty well. Both Maya and Max have ways to look at the node based architecture, but a lot of artists prefer dealing with a viewport (menus and tabs) vs. a node network. Autodesk has made a greater push in that direction recently with the node editor but Houdini is still the best when it comes to 3d node based architecture. Nuke comes in a close second for node based compositing. Safe to say that most material editors are now node based (substance designer) and that is the way most CGI is going towards. There is simply more power being able to visualize how each node can connect to each other downstream, and upstream. Houdini has the added bonus in that, it is very nondestructive. Each node can be detached or reattached, at any given time and the workflow will update. There is a reason that Houdini artists pick up the work that Maya artists can't execute. Yeah there's no question that Houdini is the way to go for procedural 3D. I'm just finishing my first real Houdini job and I couldn't imagine how I would have done it in Maya or any other package. The problem with Maya is they try to hide the procedural elements just enough to not alienate the artists and hope that it's still useful for the TDs, and more often than not I think they just end up frustrating both groups.
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Jul 5, 2015 05:11
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Also if you're not deleting history as a modeller then chances are Maya is going to get unstable real quick. So that destroys any kind of modularity about a node system for us. In terms of destructive modeling it goes (from least to most) Houdini -> Max -> Maya -> Modo in my opinion I think.
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Jul 5, 2015 18:35
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What are folks fluid sims of choice for Maya? I'm trying to do some decently scaled shots of car/truck crashing into a river. I'd like to say Phoenix is working great for me, but their Maya support is terrible and in general just don't seem to care about the Maya version. So... I'm looking elsewhere. I know of RealFlow, but what are some others that people have used and has actual support for Maya? edit: I have Maya 2015 (and 2016 since I'm a subscriber, but I don't want to switch in the middle of a project) so maybe I should give Bifrost a shot even though I know it doesn't do foam/spray just yet. BonoMan fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 16:29
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Are the one who just asked that on chaos group and found the latest nightly build broken? I've had to go back a couple nightlies sometimes with the max version, some of them do end up getting uploaded broken. I can't speak for Maya support but that might be the issue.
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Jul 7, 2015 17:36
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cubicle gangster posted:Are the one who just asked that on chaos group and found the latest nightly build broken? Yup, I thought I recognized your avatar! (on other parts of the forum). I loved the dev's response to me mentioning that, despite a clean install, it's not showing up int he plugin manager "oh that's easy! it's not installed correctly!" Couldn't do anything but shake my head and laugh. Although I do like their willingness to respond quickly.
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Jul 7, 2015 17:44
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yeah, it's pretty obvious it's not installed correctly, ha. Like taking your car to a garage for them to go 'yep, it's busted' They mean well though, and ivaylo is a machine. e:katev, they have 2 ivaylo's on the phoenix team cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 17:51
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cubicle gangster posted:yeah, it's pretty obvious it's not installed correctly, ha. Like taking your car to a garage for them to go 'yep, it's busted' Yeah, going through old threads for info, those guys reply nonstop which I like. But it just feels like in terms of infrastructure and overall feel of the product (tutorials, web presence and functionality, etc) they still seem to be in some sort of disjointed startup mode. Which is odd considering how pervasive Phoenix and VRay are. Probably not a big problem for big houses with their own internal teams of coders and troubleshooters. But for one man bands like myself, I rely on the companies I purchase from to be organized well (or at least I hope for them to be). And by all of that I mean FOR THE LOVE OF GOD CHAOSGROUP PLEASE PUT SOME MAYA TUTORIALS OUT THERE! edit: Also popped back to July 4th daily. All is well. July 5th on don't seem to work for some reason.
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Jul 7, 2015 18:07
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Methods of working with phoenix change on such a regular basis too, if they had done documentation a few months ago it'd all be useless now. I'm not defending that but the development changes so much, i've had some nightlies where the interface is massively different and i've got labeled checkboxes that dont even show up in a search of the forums or help which vanish the next version. They're planning to break it off into a separate fire/smoke and fluids solver soon so i think they'll be waiting until that for the next big documentation update. They hired some people recently to work on sample scenes and tutorials full time.
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Jul 7, 2015 18:23
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cubicle gangster posted:Methods of working with phoenix change on such a regular basis too, if they had done documentation a few months ago it'd all be useless now. I'm not defending that but the development changes so much, i've had some nightlies where the interface is massively different and i've got labeled checkboxes that dont even show up in a search of the forums or help which vanish the next version. I do kind of like the aggressive feature changes in the nightlies, but yeah... it can be hard to grasp stuff quickly. Although that's really my problem and not theirs (or more specifically the problems of the producers on this feature getting me to crunch super hard to try to get a Toronto screener ready.).
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Jul 7, 2015 19:04
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sigma 6 posted:Geaman: Can you elaborate on this? The part about removing shadows using IBL...? Been very busy for the past few days, sorry about not seeing this earlier. If you take the time to capture an HDR before/after your scan of a large object (say, a boulder measuring one or more meters in size) you can use that HDR to create an IBL of the conditions under which you scanned your object. Once you have your scanned mesh and texture, you can bring that in to your engine/renderer of choice that supports IBL (e.g., Maya, VRay, Mental Ray, etc.) and, after plugging in the HDR, you now have a fairly accurate representation of the lighting conditions from the time of the scan. From here you can bake out the IBL to the object texture, and use the inverse of that map to remove or reduce the shadows and occlusions in your photoscan albedo texture.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:58
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BonoMan posted:What are folks fluid sims of choice for Maya? I'm trying to do some decently scaled shots of car/truck crashing into a river. 2016 Bifrost does have foam. RealFlow is probably the best bet if you're using 2015.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:44
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Ccs posted:2016 Bifrost does have foam. I just installed 2016 alongside 2015 so I'll try it and see. edit: which brings me to another question. The next two months will probably see me doing quite a lot of simulations (crowd, water, dust). Does anybody have any experience with desktop distributed rendering/simulation solutions such as those from Boxx?
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Jul 8, 2015 04:17
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phoenix is all about fewer, faster cores and the fastest ram you can get. a 4ghz (or higher if you can swing it) i7 will be much better than a 3gz xeon that has 4 times as many cores for the actual simulation. I dont really understand how ram speed affects it, but if you've got the choice between 800 and 1600mhz ram, go faster. I don't think it makes a difference in anything else. For that my only information is this quote from paul oblomov. "Changed my memory to 2400, but it can't run on my SB at full speed, working on 2133. I get 15% speed gain from 1600 (9 9 9 24 vs 11 12 12 30)" I got faster ram but also a faster cpu so I could never do a side by side test.
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Jul 8, 2015 16:50
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cubicle gangster posted:phoenix is all about fewer, faster cores and the fastest ram you can get. a 4ghz (or higher if you can swing it) i7 will be much better than a 3gz xeon that has 4 times as many cores for the actual simulation. Great info. Are you familiar with a workflow for caching out to a renderfarm? We have several newer i7 machines here with 32 gigs of DDR4 memory in them. I'd love to utilize them when everyone is gone for the evening!
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Jul 8, 2015 16:55
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To simulate or for rendering? Simulating it's not possible. rendering is just a question of making sure all the simulation data files (.aur) are visible by all machines and the cache paths are set. I use backburner, works fine. One thing to note that tripped me up 10 times in a row when fist using phoenix, the cache file paths when simulating are set to "$(scene_dir)", you have to change these to a proper file path otherwise when it duplicates the scenes to each machine for rendering. Being able to simulate on more than one machine is coming - not sure if thats in a feature yet. right now phoenix uses a license when the editing controls are up but they stay up while it's simulating. the plan is to make it so you can press simulate and it frees up the license (but all the controls become greyed out apart from start, stop & pause) so you can open 5 slight variations on different machines and pick your favorite the next day. There are scripting controls, so right now you can set up a script so that when the sim ends for example it adds 0.1 to vorticity, amends the sim path and runs again (I cant help, but I know it's possible). The standard script thats in there just tells it to start rendering on sim end. i've not bothered doing this and you may not need to - I do my test sims in the day via remote desktop on a spare machine at a low quality setting so each run through takes about an hour, the gpu preview exports in a couple mins each. then at the end of the day when I have one I like I read from those .aur files and do a re simulation which basically keeps the same overall movement but adds a shitload more detail. it's generally the fastest/best way to work. with fluids instead of adding more detail you resim (or add) the foam/splash (getting them right first time was a nightmare)
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Jul 8, 2015 17:22
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I'm currently learning 3ds max for game modeling (semi low poly stuff, under 3000, for TF2 if that matters) and I have this dumb question: Is there a wrong way to model? I'm more comfortable with line or polygon modeling as opposed to doing everything from primitives. Is it a matter of preference or would I be crippling myself in the long run if I for example model one way instead of another? Strotski fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 20:21
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cubicle gangster posted:To simulate or for rendering? Simulating it's not possible. rendering is just a question of making sure all the simulation data files (.aur) are visible by all machines and the cache paths are set. I use backburner, works fine. All excellent advice, thanks! And I discovered the amazing-ness of resimming the other day. Worked wonders. So to send to your remote machine for low-res sims you use backburner? I'm a total novice when it comes to distributed anything. Didn't even realize you couldn't distribute sims.
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Jul 8, 2015 20:37
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Strotski posted:I'm currently learning 3ds max for game modeling (semi low poly stuff, under 3000, for TF2 if that matters) and I have this dumb question: Whatever works for you, there's really no wrong way as long as you get what you want, provided you can model something quickly and efficiently. I use a variety of methods depending on what I'm modeling anyway, so it's really whatever suits your purpose the best. For example, when I'm doing mechanical, sub-div work, I try to stick to primitives as much as possible, because it allows me to get the exact number of edges that I need to make sure I get nice transitions, and keeps the topology really nice and clean. For things like fancy windows sills, or picture frames, or floor/ceiling trim, a couple splines with a sweep modifier works really well. Things like topology, tri count, and proper uv splitting/mapping are more important in the long run.
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Jul 8, 2015 20:45
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I see, thank you!
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Jul 8, 2015 20:58
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What Gearman said is all true however I do believe you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't at least take a crack at learning a few different modeling methods. As you gain more experience you'll probably find yourself thinking, OK, this piece would be really easy to do with box modeling, this one is best with NURBS, etc. etc. Ultimately it does come down to what works best for you, but having some flexibility is never a bad thing.
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Jul 8, 2015 21:41
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I guess it depends on what you want to focus on/hopefully do for a living. If you're sticking with video game stuff, you can probably ignore a lot of techniques. I'd say if you've been in the industry a while, have your core set of skills in place, then sure mess around and learn new stuff. But until then I'd buckle down and learn what you will actually be using.
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Jul 8, 2015 22:03
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BonoMan posted:So to send to your remote machine for low-res sims you use backburner? no, sorry, that's just for rendering. I use remote desktop to actually log into the machine from my desk and open a copy of max so I dont have to walk over to it... To do multiple sims at once the only way is to open multiple copies of max on each machine (need a license for each now, but not in the future), or script them to run one after the other on a single machine.
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Jul 8, 2015 22:06
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How does Maya's Bifrost stack up against RealFlow or Houdini when doing ocean simulations? Anyone have any experience in this? I'm finding very few real write ups about this.
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Jul 9, 2015 02:12
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For making game art. The fastest way for me for hard surface is block with primitives -> subdivide -> export geo to zbrush to combine/merge and sculpt on that. The latest ZBrush tools have some useful stuff for doing this inside of ZBrush so less time I need to spend in Maya/Max. For organic stuff I almost entirely do everything in ZBrush. Up until the low poly stage. To learn, it's a good idea to stick in Maya/Max for a while and use ZBrush as a support package. But once you get comfortable in ZBrush you can use it for almost anything, regardless of whether it's hard surface or organic.
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Jul 9, 2015 05:18
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ceebee posted:For making game art. The fastest way for me for hard surface is block with primitives -> subdivide -> export geo to zbrush to combine/merge and sculpt on that. The latest ZBrush tools have some useful stuff for doing this inside of ZBrush so less time I need to spend in Maya/Max. I still prefer to do most of my hard-surface work in a traditional package like Max or Maya for production work, because it's easier to go back and make changes either for yourself or if someone else has to grab your file. Even little things like adjusting a chamfer or placement of details is easier by just moving a few edge loops. However, this is strictly my own preference, and the hard-surface tools in Zbrush are really rad. I'd still recommend anyone getting their feet wet to get a firm grasp of sub-division modeling in a traditional package and then move in to Zbrush.
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Jul 9, 2015 16:11
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Pathos posted:How does Maya's Bifrost stack up against RealFlow or Houdini when doing ocean simulations? Anyone have any experience in this? I'm finding very few real write ups about this. BiFrost is new so no big studios are really using it yet. I've seen some small projects and short films that used it to simulate stuff like champagne in a glass, etc. but nothing yet for major effects. 2016 added foam and spray so now it might become more widespread, but if you have a project with a strict deadline, don't use Bifrost yet. It's for studios that can spend some time with R&D to see if it works well.
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Jul 10, 2015 01:50
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Ccs posted:BiFrost is new so no big studios are really using it yet. I've seen some small projects and short films that used it to simulate stuff like champagne in a glass, etc. but nothing yet for major effects. 2016 added foam and spray so now it might become more widespread, but if you have a project with a strict deadline, don't use Bifrost yet. It's for studios that can spend some time with R&D to see if it works well. Most big studios have given up on Maya for FX work a long time ago.
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Jul 10, 2015 08:55
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So, given that, would you guys recommend Houdini or RealFlow for that sort of thing? Both have decent indie pricing which would fit my needs pretty well....
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Jul 10, 2015 15:05
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Pathos posted:So, given that, would you guys recommend Houdini or RealFlow for that sort of thing? Both have decent indie pricing which would fit my needs pretty well.... I can't speak for RealFlow, but I know that Houdini gets a lot of use in the Game Industry.
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Jul 10, 2015 15:24
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I think if you are gonna be able to spend the time learning new software and aren't looking at a quick fix plugin (not that Phoenix, RF, etc are necessarily "quick" but you get what I mean) then I would absolutely learn Houdini. You will not go wrong learning it.
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Jul 10, 2015 15:54
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Awesome. Thanks guys. That's a huge help.
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Jul 10, 2015 18:39
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Handiklap fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Jul 12, 2015 |
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