Hi Halfdan,
thanks a lot for the explanation and yes, I would be very interested to give Contours a try if you could provide me with examples to understand that "wrapping into a phenomena tree". I only did straight forward SPDLs so far.
The problems I encountered weren't related to undersampling or such, but I had for instance a case where I cloned an object 6 times and stacked the copies on top of each other (a symbolized rack server). When I rendered this with the region, the original object wasn't rendered at all, the first copy was rendered with ink lines only and all other copies rendered normally (phong for the surface and ink lines on top of that). Huh?
I was wondering what's going on, looked at all the objects and materials and seconds later, XSI crashed.
After reopening (I had saved shortly before the crash) everything rendered fine...
Another case was, when I wanted to render the animated stylized objects to disk, I got a crash the moment rendering started. I had worked for days on that scene with the render region without any problems and the settings were exactly the same. I couldn't solve it. Renderregion was fine, Render to disk crashed.
I then merged the scene into a new one and it worked.
A lot of weird stuff like that was happening and since the scenes were extremely simple, the problem seemed to be the Ink Line Shaders - it was the only part of XSI that I hadn't used much before in this project.
Nothing of this is reproducible, but I haven't seen that many crashes over the last two years of much heavier use...
Since Swift 3D for XSI is no longer available and no other available options seem to exist, I want to at least try to write my own...
If Contours are really bad, I would have to start from scratch or use another software altogether. :-(
Thanks a lot for your support!
Thomas Helzle
Am 30.11.2006, 18:03 Uhr, schrieb Halfdan Ingvarsson <hingvars(at)Softimage.COM>:
> There is a way of doing it, through embedding the contour store/contrast shaders in a phenomena tree.
>
> On the surface, it might sound like a good idea, but you'll just end up with the same problems as the toon lens shader but with a twist. The contour shading still relies on the point-sampled data, so if there is undersampling you'll still end up with missing objects and flickering lines. Dedicated toon rendering engines work from the geometry data itself and therefore don't suffer from those artefacts of point-sampling.
>
> I can try and dig up some examples and send you off-line, if you're still willing to pursue it. I don't particularly recommend it though.
>
> - Â
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of Thomas Helzle
> Sent: 30-Nov-06 11:52
> To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
> Subject: Re: Custom Contour Shader Questions...
>
> No, but the more I dig into this area, the more it looks like something complicated, what at first I didn't expect.
>
> Halfdan, could you maybe help me with that?
> Is it possible at all?
>
> Thanks a lot!
>
> Thomas Helzle
> www.screendream.de
>
> Am 30.11.2006, 17:28 Uhr, schrieb Adrian Lopez <liquidlightdigital(at)gmail.com>:
>
>> Thomas,
>>
>> Have you tried contacting Softimage directly about this? This sounds like a
>> deep core issue.
>>
>> Adrian
>>
>> On 11/30/06, Thomas Helzle <xsi(at)screendream.de> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> for an upcoming job, I currently try to look at the contour shaders in MR.
>>> I have built all four required parts (contour store, contrast, material
>>> and output) with the shader wizard and have read everything I was able to
>>> find about them, but I am missing one final link:
>>> In Max and Maya, there is a place called "Render Globals" where some of
>>> those shaders have to be attached. This is not the Render Globals from the
>>> SDK but a place like Output Shaders or Lens Shaders where you plugin your
>>> shader.
>>> In XSI there is no such place AFAIK.
>>>
>>> - Is it possible to use MR Contour shaders in XSI at all?
>>> - Where would I attach the store and contrast shaders to?
>>> - Am I right in thinking that the Contour Shader itself has to be attached
>>> to the Contour input of the main material node?
>>>
>>> My goal is, to be able to render contours to a vector format like EPS or
>>> SWF for usage in Flash and the contour shaders from mental images already
>>> contain such an example to start from...
>>>
>>> I heard that the quality of the Contour Shaders output isn't that great,
>>> but if possible, I would like to give it a go anyway.
>>> One reason being that I ran into a lot of problems with the XSI Toon
>>> Shaders over the last 14 days like missing objects in renders just before
>>> another of the unusual regular crashes... The speed is also horrible, so
>>> before turning back to Lightwave/Swift 3D, I would like to give Contours a
>>> go.
>>>
>>> Cheers and thanks for any pointers!
>>>
>>> Thomas Helzle
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>>
>>
>>
>
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