robcat2075

I've put in a bug report to Steffen. I'm going to temporarily table my tutorial effort until I see what he thinks about the multipass thing. Until then, I still suggest this workflow... SSAO Effect Only ON (while you are testing your SSAO settings) Samples 32 Higher if there is obvious stair-stepping the shadows. set Radius and Distance to a large number like 200 Gamma 1.0 (try 0.8 for darker effect) Density 50% Softeness 50% Luminance Influence 0 Blur the effect OFF (the Radius parameter below Blur is for Blur effects only) Do test renders with an odd number of multipasses. SSAO can't be tested in an onscreen render, you have to render to file. regular AO should be OFF, of course. Reduce Distance if the shadows extend too far behind objects or if there are dark halos. Reduce Radius if the shadow areas are too wide for your taste. Raise Radius if the shadows are dropping off too suddenly. Do more test renders.

Here's a comparison of a (mostly white) AO render and my best shot so far at recreating that with SSAO. They are similar but different.

Distance seems to control front-to-back influence. Larger numbers make it easier for an edge to shadow something behind it. Too large numbers create undesirable dark halos around the edges of objects, although with odd multipasses that problem is not so severe overall. A lot of stuff i thought i knew has changed since i found this even-odd multipass issue.

"Radius" roughly represents the screen distance that one surface can shadow another and/or the size of the shadow effect. If it is too small, the shadow is clipped before it fades out completely.

My scene is 200 cm from the ground to the top of the rabbit's ears Same here. I think "radius" represents pixels on the screen I'm thinking that ti depends a lot on the scene but here's what I used for that shot... (the gammas setting was set extra low to make the artifacts more visible for study) 1

Here's an example comparison of 9 passes and 16 passes. Flip between the first (9 passes) and last frame (16 passes). 9vs16passes.mov The anti-aliasing of internal details is better with 16 passes but everything else is better in the 9 pass version

Another tidbit. SSAO works better on a multi-pass render than a regular render BUT multi-pass set to an even number of passes tends to have more halo and weird artifact problems than with an odd number of passes. I don't know why since SSAO is only figured once at the end of a render no matter how many passes are used but it makes a visible difference in my test scene. I only noticed this after a couple weeks of testing with ... 4 passes.

I'm pretty sure the time runs from when you register so I suggest waiting until the clock runs out. We just have one-year terms now.

Looks like everytime their $299 deal gets maxed out they add another one so I guess I have time to decide still.

They have a Kickstarter is not a Store rule. I guess they are within that, but they are so far past their development money goal that everything now is just selling product.

that effect is almost like a lucite cube with something in it.

Here's are some basic settings i can suggest until i get my tut finished: SSAO Effect Only ON (while you are testing your SSAO settings) Samples 32 Higher if there is obvious stair-stepping the shadows. set Radius and Distance to a large number like 200 Gamma 1.0 Density 100% Softeness 50% Luminance Influence 0 Blur the effect OFF (the Radius parameter below Blur is for Blur effects only) gradually reduce Distance until the black halos are gone reduce Radius if the shadow areas are too wide SSAO can't be tested in an onscreen render, you have to render to file. regular AO should be OFF, of course.

I couldn't find a gallery of pictures of printouts. Is there one? The one pic in the Kickstarter page was suspiciously soft-focus. I'm also surprised this offering hasn't exceeded the Kickstarter guidelines on selling products.

I wonder how long before the big printer companies get into this, acquire all the patents and we have cheap 3D printers but the 3D ink costs a fortune.

That's a good price if they can do it. I'm tempted to jump at it but the print size seems a bit small for things I imagine myself wanting to do.

I've seen that done in theaters where they can't have an actual flame, they have a fluttering cloth and light it and it looks like a flame!

It occurs to me that if what you need is more than 99 frames of onionskin and you'd rather not use onionskin at all you could create a single model that exhibits this behavior with... a spreadsheet!

Cool-looking result even though I'm not sure what you're doing exactly. The clipping plane problem could be reported as a bug if you have a repeatable case.

I was going to sit down this morning to finally record this tut and now they are smashing the street outside my house. Maybe this evening I'll get it done. Yes, it is a very large sun light (1000 cm) tilted somewhat forward rather than straight down. Only 2 rays, but not "distributed". More passes makes more rays and this was at least 100 passes, but it still only took 276 seconds to render. I'm not sure what "size" truly means for a sun light which is already an infinitely wide source of parallel light rays, but in practice it seems to govern how much those rays are tilted among the passes.

No SSAO, no AO, just a standard light. That happens to be a glass casserole dish. Casserole_Dish.mdl It's really just a quick doodad I needed for this test scene. I'm still adding stuff to it to show what works and what doesn't.

In Windows there is a little pop-up menu at the bottom that shows "hidden" apps (those not with a button on the task bar) and it shows the icons for the render nodes that are "offline" with red cricle and slash over them. You on them and select "Activate" to make them "online" that's how it is handled in Windows and there must be something like that on Mac?

While I was researching... Would you believe this AO-look render comes from just one Sun light? It's not on a spinning rig or on a spline or z-buffered, it's a regular ray-traced Sun light like we've had for 15 years or more.

Didn't someone already make a write-up on how to set up NetRender? I dimly recall that.

Hi Toadstool, welcome to the forum! When you have questions or doubts, go ahead and ask, someone here will have an answer.

That quite possibly might be THE best help I have ever received in ANY forum EVER. Thank you Rob. You Da Man! And thanks Fuchur for the tutes!!! Be sure to let all the other fangs know! One of the things that facilitates help is that the A:M forum lets us upload screencam movie files like that. A lot of forums will only let you upload a picture or two or not even that and you have to provide your own webspace if you want to show something. A:M Forums makes it easy for me (or anyone else) to screencam an answer and post it.