Description

Title:	A few feature requests
Category:	Workflow
Status:	Considered
Priority:
Posted By:	tamtamx ( Tarkan Sarim )
Date Created:	19 June 2016
Description:	Hi guys, Had a play with the latest beta and I have to say it's coming along really well. Overall I feel quite at home and comfortable with ornatrix and it's workflows which are very similar to what we have been using in in house tools in vfx over the years. Overall it feels complete and there are just a few things that I feel are missing and need a little extra attention. 1. direct map painting from within maya. Right now I think we have to paint maps for the attributes somewhere else or go a manuel path when using the paint tools in maya so I would love to see a direct paint button for each attribute and being able to create the map directly within the ornatricks menus. 2. Callculation performance. I feel the performance is very slow when upping the density compared to other tools I've used. It would be desirable to aim for realtime feedback for at least 100k primitives which is about the amount for human hair. I don't know if ornatrix is mulitthreaded but it definitely doesn't feel that way. In modern fur tools things are even written to run on the GPU and are even realtime when changing paremeters with 1 million primitives on screen. 3. Primitives facing camera feature In order to see the specular properly when previewing the fur in the viewport we need the ribbons to always face the camera. That would enable us to preview the fur in high quality inside the viewport. That's it for now. Cheers, Tarkan

Follow Ups

20 June 2016 #8692
EPHERE	Thank you very much for the feedback Tarkan, it is great to hear from you! Happy to hear that you like the overall progress. I have implemented vertex color mapping for next build, so you can paint vertex colors and have them drive various parameters in Ornatrix. I think this could be a good middle-ground between painting detailed maps and not having any painting at all. Please try it when you get the new build. I agree on this one and it will be in our cross-hairs once we finish current batch of work. Ornatrix is multi-threaded in most places but one of the issues at the moment is that we have to convert hair to mesh for viewport display. I think we can correct this for future versions, or come up with a way to offload more steps to the GPU. This is related to point 2. We actually have this option (to face camera) but it is disabled because it slows down the hair display even further right now. Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.)
20 June 2016 #8693
tamtamx	Hi Marsel, I found out from autodesk that you can write out your hair as XPD files and within Xgen that can be read and displayed instead of Xgen hair. Maybe that is a quick and easy fix for ornatrix or even temporarily while you are developing your own. The Xgen viewport display is pretty fast even with 1 million primitives on screen. I guess it would be great if this portion of the code cold be copied out and reused somehow but I'm not sure how easy it is. That's what they wrote. "Hi Tarken, you could find XGen Viewport 2.0 shaders in runTime/plug-ins/xgen/presets/shaders directory. But it’s uneasy to implement effects like shadow/ssao/... due to the lack of formal APIs for those effects. Alternatively, you could export your hair data to XPD. Within XGen, it could choose an XPD generator to read your hair data." Hope that helps. Cheers, Tarkan
20 June 2016 #8694
EPHERE	Thanks for the info Tarkan. My concern would be with the overhead of having to export/import the XPD files. For 100K hairs it would likely be excrutiatingly slow and not very real-time. I'll look at these shaders but I think the API they refer to is what needs to be exposed to make it possible to tap into Xgen's hair display. Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.)
20 June 2016 #8695
tamtamx	You think it would be possible to save the XPD in to the clipboard instead and then feed it to Xgen?
20 June 2016 #8696
EPHERE	The problem is with generation of XPD itself. It performs compression among other things so no matter if it's stored in RAM or HDD it is the generation of the file which would be the slow part. Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.)
22 June 2016 #8713
tamtamx	I see what you mean Marsel. Not a good option then I guess. Regarding vertex maps for painting...I guess it's good enough. Looking forward to try the next build.