[Kevron]

Hi,

1. Is it possible to export motion vectors in maxwell with pla baked animation. I guess no since Maxwell can't yet render pla baked animation with motion blur. But I would like to double-check it with you guys before figuring out alternative workflow.

2. Hair on objects under hypernurbs seems to behave strangely. My observation so far:
Hair not parented under object with hypernurbs = smoothing on object gone in render
Hair parented under object with hypernurbs (editor set 0 render set 3) = render only hair guides
Hair parented under object with hypernurbs (editor set 3 render set 3) = works

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Tor M

[JDHill]

• 1. I don't think so. To generate the Motion Vector output, the engine checks which objects have motion blur, renders them without motion blur, and then writes them into the Motion Vector channel output.

• 2. First, is there some reason for parenting a hair object directly under a hypernurbs? Apparently, that prevents the hair from working -- you should see that only guides are rendered in Cinema in this situation, too. Second, if you do that and try to export to Maxwell, then look in your Cinema Console -- you should see the plugin telling you that an error occurred ("Could not lock hair object, guides will be used instead"). This means that a necessary function call has failed, and that we will not be able to ask Cinema to generate hairs without it crashing. So the solution would seem to be: do not parent hair objects directly under hypernurbs objects.

[Kevron]

Thank you for your answer. My first route was to try hair not parented to an hypernurbs object, but that seems to disable the effect of the hypernurbs in the render from maxwell.

So I get hair, but on a non-smoothed object. But if I go under the hypernurbs parameters and set editor 'smoothing' from 0 to 2 (render is set to 2), then the object will be affected by the hypernurbs in the render.

Is this normal?

Regards,
Tor m

[JDHill]

I guess I must not understand your scenario. Take this structure, for example, where the Hair and HyperNURBS objects are separated:

Code: Select all

  Hair
  HyperNURBS
    - Polygon

In this case, I find no issues -- everything works as expected. The problem scenario I have identified is this one:

Code: Select all

  HyperNURBS
    - Hair
    - Polygon

In this case, the Hair object will apparently malfunction (it will render only guides, both in Cinema, and Maxwell), and the polygon will not be subdivided by the HyperNURBS. I assume this is a Cinema bug, or that this setup is just not supported by Cinema. On the other hand, this structure works fine:

Code: Select all

  HyperNURBS
    - Polygon
    - Hair

The other thing I should mention is that when you render in Fire, the Editor LOD is used, and when you render in Maxwell, the Renderer LOD is used. Depending on what you are doing, this may help explain any difference you see when setting different values for Subdivision Editor & Renderer in your HyperNURBS.

If this does not help, please just send me an example scene (jeremy at nextlimit dotcom) so I can check it out. The simpler the model, the better.

[jojojoj]

third solution is the correct one of the last two if you want HN subdivisions, that's no bug. the principle is that only the first object and the objects it contains will be subdivided.

[Kevron]

Thank you for your replies. It could be my scene that screws it up. But I started out with your first scenario.

Code: Select all

hair
HyperNURBS
       -polygon object

In my case the polygon object is a dog with pla baked animation.

I'll send you a scene file tomorrow, so you can see what my issues are. I think my setup is correct, but a set of fresh eyes would be great.

Regards,
Tor m

[Kevron]

Hi,

I have run into another issue on my path to work with hair, and thats the "Object ID Color" pass.
Its always good to output a RGB Matte pass for color correction in post, and I was trying to get all my hair system rendered out with "object ID color" RED.

This is the results:


I guess I could call it the day if may name was Andy Warhol

Have not tried it with Material ID yet, but this looks definitely funky, its updating to a new color every frame.

Any takers?

Regards,
Tor Martin

[eric nixon]

Firstly thanks for the discovery that id's are not working with hair, I guess this will be fixed in time.

Hair parented under object with hypernurbs (editor set 3 render set 3) = works

When you say this works, do you mean that the hypernurbs is doing something here? In that case do you have a render to compare normal vs hypernurbs hair ?

Thanks.

[Kevron]

I have recieved a mail by Jeremy about his findings regarding Hair and hypernurbs. I guess it is ok to paste his answer here for other people to read:

Finally tonight, I discovered a cute Cinema bug (it appears to be present in R12 and up):

1. make a cube
2. set Coords > R.H to 45°
3. make a hypernurbs
4. set Coords > S.X to 0.5
5. drag the cube under the hypernurbs
6. drag it back out
7. perform steps 5 & 6 repeatedly

This happens when you do it from code too, and it's making big problems for the plugin. What does it have to do with hair? Just try running Current State to Object on the hypernurbs, then dragging the generated polygon out from under its parent null -- that's roughly what I need to do in order to get a mesh I can use for tracing hair root UVs. I have some ideas on how to work around this, hopefully one of them will work.

Cheers,
Jeremy

So, there is a Bug here that could cause some problems with Hair. If I render out the dog with subdivision editor set to 0, only guides will render. If I set subdivision editor to 1 or more, then everything render normal.

I´ll find some time to render out some different settings, but it works for me as long I have set subdivision editor above 0.

Regards,
Tor M

[Kevron]

Seems that Material ID works good with hair.

[JDHill]

Actually, after I sent you that email, I found it's not even related to hypernurbs. Try these simpler steps instead (in R12 and up):

• 1. make a cube, set its coords > R.H to 45 degrees
  2. make a null, set its coords > S.X to 0.5
  3. drag the cube into, then back out of the null, a few times

I'll check out the reports on ID colors. Last month we fixed a similar problem regarding particles, so it's possible there is some work to do for hair too.

[Kevron]

Hi JDHill, thank you for your help in the prior posts.

Now I have a new challenge for you

Take a look at this video:



There are some strange things happening is the fur color between the forehead and the "nose bridge"

Here are some prictures:

Frame 111 - Maxwell tag with raytrace uv activated


Notice the "black" spot in the fur?

Here is the same frame, just with a regular color. No raytracing being done.


The "spot" is gone. First I thought that It could be picking up some strange color from the texture, but here is the same frame only with texture applied.


Also normals seems to be in the right direction.


So now my theory is that the point where the fur traces and get its color from is somewhat switched. I looks like from the video that the "nose bridge" is sampling color from the forehead (lighter color), and the forehead is sampling color that should be on the "nose bridge" darker color.

Guess it has something to do with the nose bridge mesh and the forehead mesh being quite close to each other and something with the max.distance in the ray trace UVs options.
Have tried several different "Distances", but no number could give me a decent looking fur.

Here is a part of the scene file : https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1059954/LieOgH ... /UVFur.zip

I also see that the Render Region tag is not working in my scene. I cant see the yellow guide that shows the region of interest.

Hope I have given you enough information on this, you have done a great job on bringing C4D and Maxwell together.

Regards,
Tor Martin

[Kevron]

Just want to thank Jeremy for solving this issue with Hair and UV´s. Not sure if Jeremy has uploaded the latest plugin to this forum, but the one I got, "Maxwell_for_Cinema_4D-2.7.25-R14", solved my issue.


Best,
Tor Martin