Doesn't necessarily make sense

Here’s a sample shot from Last Chance being composited. Can’t stand the auto layout function – no way to remember where all the nodes are

Here’s some old R&D renders from Last Chance. This one shows an individual paint stroke. First flat, then displaced and finally with highlights. The idea was to have different paint pigments, some metallic etc. based on the actual “tube” they came from – but as usual, I didn’t have time for that.
The rendering doesn’t do paint mixing anyway so it wouldn’t have been worth it.

The last image shows the same stroke repeated – so it’s a little boring. What’s noteworthy is the curving of the strokes which gives some neat effects, especially on animated objects. There’s a couple of things that Really don’t work – namely UV borders. The strokes start rotating and flipping randomly because the direction changes. I solved this by having the geometry always face the camera – it kinda works.

This image shows the preview options available when constructing the image. Points, lines, sprites and strokes. This helps in constructing the image – the density can be visualized with Points, the direction and lenght with Lines. Finally the Strokes show how the render will look – although without the canvas.

From Project_Last_Chance on Flickr.

Started tinkering with 3Delight again after a long break. One thing that has been bugging me for quite awhile is the inability to combine Hypershade nodes with my own shaders. For some reason the assignment panel doesn’t allow for this.

The main gripe I have with this is that textures don’t show up in the viewport. When doing lookdev or texturing it’s nice to see what you have plugged into the material. Last time I looked at this I ended up assigning a lambert to the object, and then using an override. But that’s a hassle.

There’s a couple of ways this can be done – either through the RSL hypershade node, or by writing a Maya plugin. In this post I’ll go through the plugin. (source can be downloaded at the end of post)

Anything plugged into the slots here won’t evaluate as expected.

So starting with the Surface Shader example in the DevKit. This one has Color and Transparency, enough to start out with.

What we need to do is write a corresponding Ri.h file for our custom shader so that 3Delight knows how to translate this node. This .h file contains the inputs, outputs and RSL code to run the shader. For a surface shader this is simple, 2 inputs, 2 outputs and no shading inbetween.

Ramp connected to shader. Now we can use all the nodes in the hypershade as normal.

And finally the testrender from 3Delight. Pretty cool. I like the extendability of 3Delight. The forums are also extremely helpful and contain much more information that the manual.

Download the source files.

One annoying thing about CG production is the fact that you have to keep a windows box or two around for Photoshop, since Adobe in their infinite wisdom can’t port it to Linux. Works on OSX so go figure.

There are a couple of really good solutions for running Windows inside Linux. VirtualBox and VMWare are easy to setup run fairly fast.  A wacom tablet works as a mouse straight away but getting the pressure and tilt sensitivity to work can be a hassle.

First the driver has to be disabled in Linux. Either via rmmod or blacklisting the module from loading altogether. Then the device can be selected in the Virtual Machine and the windows driver will work correctly.

Photoshop inside VMWare with wacom tablet working. This is great news. No more maintaining a windows box just for one application. VirtualBox 3.1 on Debian Lenny didn’t want to play along this far. VMWare worked better even though VirtualBox feels slightly more responsive.

The last option is to run it under Wine – which is quite buggy and unusable depending on version. So far the best verson to use is CS2. This works out of the box – just make sure the Wacom is loaded in Linux. The good part about this solution is that the tablet will work in other Linux apps as well.

Performance wise the wine version is great.