#'Black Hole' Texture
10 messages in this thread
Gary- Let me first start by explaining what I'm doing. You may have a
way around this without my "Black Hole" material. I'm animating a highly
reflective desktop with several static items sitting on it. The animation
consists of a paper wad landing on this desktop and unfolding into a flat
piece of paper. No prob so far…but what I would REALLLLLYYY like to do
is to render the desk with its items (except the paper wad) once and use it
for a background for speed and then composite the animated paper wad over
the background in VP. However, I lose my reflection of my paper wad when
it lands (obviously) using this method. What I would like to do is create
a black material to assign to the desktop that would ONLY reflect the
paperwad (no reacting with lights) and have the rest of the desktop render
pure black. Thus ending up with a rendered image of the paper wad and its
reflection on the desktop against a pure black background. If this were
(or is possible) then I could simply use the alpha channel in VP to
composite the wad and its reflection over the background of the desk. If
this is possible, please let me know. Else I would like to put in a
request for a "Black Hole" material in R3. Thanks.
-Mark
Basically, if you want to use shiny surfaces and/or shadows, you have to
integrate those surfaces into the scene itself. The only shortcut I could
think of is to render the desk minus the desktop and everything on it as a
background, and then render everything else as foreground items and
composite them on top of the desk in VP.
– G
Gary- The more I've thought about my "Black Hole" material, the more
complicated I've realized that it would be. If it were even possible to
do, it would really have to be specially coded in the renderer and assigned
as a special material attribute because in my example, you would actually
want the reflection and shadow to contain the faint woodgrain that the
desktop was assigned. This way the object could be matted over the
background and other reflections from background objects wouldn't show
through the paper wad reflection. <Sigh> They must be pumping too much
oxegen in through the air conditioning, for my brain to think of these
crazy things. Oh well, it was just a thought. Thanks.
BTW, another question. I'm writing this message at 2:00 A.M. because I
had to come up to the office to check on the computers due to a sudden
electrical storm (They are on an all night render). Does anyone know of
any way of remotely powering a system up and down via modem. That would
sure make life much easier during these Oklahoma storms. I suppose a good
UPS would be the best solution, but it would be nice if there were a way to
power up and down remotely.
Thanks again,
-Mark
Mark,
You can remotely power-up devices over the phone using X-10 equipment.
Contact Home Automation Labs (800-445-9605) for more info. They offer a
"Remote Control Telephone Responder" for $80 which allows you to "Operate
up to 10 lights or appliances from any touch-tone phone in the world!"
Once your remote system is booted up, you can then use one of those
programs that lets you operate the PC from your location.
Eli.
Eli, Thanks for the info. That sounds like just the ticket. Honestly, I
had my doubts if anything like this was available. Thanks again.
-Mark
Perhaps they're pumping in _more_ than just oxygen via the air conditioning
system… <g>
Regarding remote activation of the hardware: there are a number of ways to
do this. Various networking programs (a la Novell) can let you log in from
a remote system and actually bring up the 3DS user interface to initiate
rendering sessions. Other networking systems (the less-expensive ones) can
at least let you log in and start up a command-line process. I'm sure some
of the folks on the forum have more experience than myself with this
(Jamie?).
– G
Gary- Thanks for the info. I'll check it out. I've seen the threads
regarding a few glitches with Lantastic, are you happy with Novell? Are
you using Lite or a full blown version?
-Mark
There are plenty of folks using Lantastic with 3DS succesfully, but you've
got to be aware of a number of things to avoid. (I know one of those
things is using various caches, such as smartdrv.) Jamie's using Novell
Lite up in the lab, but only because he's been waiting for EVER for the
full version to arrive. (Lite just barely cuts it, but it _does_ work.)
I personally am just about to get into networks within the next month or
so. Until then, I'm basically a typical network idiot.
– G
That is an issue that I've often thought about. Isn't it possible for a
renderer to analyze which elements of the screen move between frames, then
set up a bounding box around the elements that do move, and only render
them?
And speaking of bounding boxes (the mind sure works in mysterious ways…),
what do you thing of the "Level of Detail" discussion in chapter 10 of "The
Renderman Companion"? Do you think that would be a practical request for
r3? Perhaps a LOD setting/switch to be used with either user defined models
or interpolated models…
You know, I guess the only way your going to satisfy me is to put me on the
payroll <GD&R>…
-MM
Hey, anything is possible! That's the beauty of software development. (as
you know 🙂
The chpt. 10 discussion in the Rman Companion basically illustrates a
pyramidal geometry "filter" method that's very similar to the way our
texture filtering (mip-mapping) works in r2. In order to do it correctly,
however, you've got to be starting from a higher-order surface than just a
rats-nest poly-face mesh. I'm sure that we'll _eventually_ move in that
direction.
– G