Ornatrix 3dsmax: Trying to use Edit Guide Brushes...

I'm only now getting around to using v.4, but I'm finding the brushes in the Edit Guides mod to be very frustrating to use. I'm getting really wonky results when using the Comb Brush. If I move it the same way anyone would a normal comb, the hair just kinks up. If I apply it to the center of a guide it will move the hair in the opposite direction of the stroke. Very confusing! I've searched for some kind of "mouse flip" type control for this, but I can't find anything. What's going on here? There is also the Scale, Cut, and Grow/Shrink brushes which as far as I can tell, do pretty much similar things. Can't we just consolodate these functions into one brush? Likewise with the Grab and Pull brushes? And finally, I wish the Smooth brush actually did something! Good luck trying to smooth out the kinks that are created when using the Grab Brush, for example. This needs to have a much more pronounced effect. Am I doing something wrong here? Why am I getting such unpredictable results when using these brushes? The only way I have been able to use Ornatrix and have any measure of control is by using Mesh Strips, which works fine except for the random and spontaneous flipping of strand directions. But that's another topic. John Brophy Fine Art www.jbrophy.com
20 January 2016 #7513
Michael McCarthy	Howdy John, Some of these issues sound like issues we have seen but spesifically fixed. Could you do me a favor and uninstall and reinstall the latest nightly build (4.1.6.6330 [Nightly]). After that please test out the issues your having and let me know if they are still causing problems. Thanks Michael
21 January 2016 #7515
Booska	Thanks for the quick reply, Michael. I did as you suggested, except that I installed 4.1.6.6334 because I didn't see 4.1.6.6330 anywhere. I wanted to give you a quick update before I go to bed. The good news is that the Comb Brush seems to be working just fine now! The bad news is that after I finished using it and clicked to the next modifier up in the stack (Hair From Guides, I think) it caused Max to crash. I thought I had outsmarted it because I'm in the habit of saving my work each time before I click out of the Edit Guides mod since I've experienced a lot of crashes at that point in the past. Spending a couple of hours styling the hair with the brushes only to have it crash as soon as you leave the modifier... well, it doesn't take many times of that happening before you learn to save beforehand. Anyway, for some reason the entire file became corrupted and now it can't be opened. So I will have to get back to you on how the other brushes are working with the new build. One more thing, though. Before the crash, I was trying to do some quick renders in V-Ray and noticed more odd behavior. When I hit the render button the V-Ray progress bar would say something like "Computing/Resolving Instances (Ornatrix)" before calculating the light cache. It seemed to be just hanging there so I checked the Task Manager and Max was peaked at 64GB of memory. I killed Max and tried it again, this time removing the Dynamics and Details mods. When I hit render I got the same V-Ray message, but this time I had the Task Manager window open and I couldn't believe my eyes. With each passing second it would gobble up 3GB, then 9GB, then 11.5GB... I watched until it got into the high 50's before killing Max again. This file is nothing special. It's empty except for the base figure model and a scalp geo. It's basically the default Fur Ball groom. I have it set to 60 Num Points and 3000 Root Count. I added a Length, a Curl, and a Frizz mods on top, but that's it. How could this be using so much RAM? John Brophy Fine Art www.jbrophy.com
21 January 2016 #7521
Michael McCarthy	Howdy. Please shoot us the file that will not open. We can have a look and debug it. Also please send us the scene you are working with that you saw this ram issue with. If there is so much ram being used that might mean something else in the scene is strange and causing crashes becasue you are running out of ram at some point. Depending on your setup 60 Num Point could be very large and cause an issue esspecially if you are using dynamcis on all of that. Thanks Michael
24 January 2016 #7529
Booska	Hi, Michael, Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. My wife and I are locked in a mortal struggle with Sky Ireland trying to get broadband up and running in our new home, and that's an ongoing preoccupation. Anyway, I've since deleted that file and installed the latest update. I'm happy to say that the problems I was having before have been solved! The brushes work fine (though I still wish the Smooth brush was stronger), and rendering is back down to normal memory amounts. Thanks again for your help! John Brophy Fine Art www.jbrophy.com

Posted by:		Booska
Data created:	20 January 2016