Cheetah3D 7.0 - Early Adopters Beta Test

Controlletti said:
Hi Frank,
thanks for the quick reply,
I switched off the camera light and used a light setting with an area light an two spots. But there isn´t any transparency. Is there anything else to adjust?
Kind regards
Thomas
Click to expand...

In the material properties choose 'Use alpha channel' in the Transparency section
Also set Index of refraction to 1.0

This should do it for makehuman characters using 'png' for the eyebrows and eyelashes.
I kind of think this wasn't necessary before with transparent .png, but don't have time to check at the moment.

Also the lights shadow type used to have to be set to 'Retrace + trans' ....
now, doesn't seem to be necessary. Again I don't have time to figure out exactly - sorry.

--shift studio.
 
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Did you check the material's Index of Refraction setting under transparency? Sometimes that needs to be set to less than the defualt 1.5. Other than that, I have had some issues with Alpha channels in Flacon not appearing correctly under some circumstances, but these are largely issues that have plugged me under regular Cheetah render as well for quite some time.

Can you upload you JAS file?
 
Controlletti said:
Hi Frank,
thanks for the quick reply,
I switched off the camera light and used a light setting with an area light an two spots. But there isn´t any transparency. Is there anything else to adjust?
Kind regards
Thomas
Click to expand...
Most likely raytrace&trans isn´t enabled as shadow type at the light-source - BUT then Cheetah won´t render it as well. Maybe double-check your material setting as well.

Cheers
Frank
 
Raytrace and trans

Hi,
thanks for your suggestions. Frank ist right. In definitely didn´t enable ray trace and trans. Now it works well:icon_thumbup: . Look at the result. Thanks to all.
Kind regards
 

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material and light settings for MakeHuman characters

I'm linking a file that shows the settings I needed to adjust to make a MakeHuman character render properly in C3D v7.0b14 using Falcon render engine or Cheetah render engine with 'radiosity' turned on.

The material settings and render tag settings are for the eyelashes, eyebrows and hair.

I believe they were all necessary, but if there is further info, please post it.

a link to sample file >>
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1js6a5v0z7bex5a/Man 1.zip?dl=0

I hope this helps.
--Shift Studio.
 

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Shift Studio said:
I'm linking a file that shows the settings I needed to adjust to make a MakeHuman character render properly in C3D v7.0b14 using Falcon render engine or Cheetah render engine with 'radiosity' turned on.

The material settings and render tag settings are for the eyelashes, eyebrows and hair.

I believe they were all necessary, but if there is further info, please post it.

a link to sample file >>
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1js6a5v0z7bex5a/Man 1.zip?dl=0

I hope this helps.
--Shift Studio.
Click to expand...

Thanks, nice tutorial.

Also, here is a nice guide for PBR rendering / materials. Not terribly long either. I'm not sure exactly what all translates over to the Falcon Renderer, but still interesting either way.

https://www.allegorithmic.com/pbr-guide
 
HDRI Reflection only

What If I don't want the light but I need the reflection map only what do I do?
 
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An experiment using C3D Collada import turned up undesired result, else it appears fine in Apple Preview, Houdini, & Unity. It's a phong flat shaded polygon object of a popular Tiger head with normals pointing towards the camera. Any ideas why the colorized polygons are not rendering in the view?
Code: 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<COLLADA xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" version="1.4.1" xmlns="http://www.collada.org/2005/11/COLLADASchema">
  <asset>
    <contributor>
      <author>CpH</author>
      <authoring_tool>Unity3D 5.4.0b17 - COLLADA exporter v1.6.0</authoring_tool>
      <comments>SVG_Collada_Export</comments>
      <copyright />
      <source_data>CpH_Default.unity</source_data>
    </contributor>
    <created>2016-06-13T22:14:13.564427-10:00</created>
    <modified>2016-06-13T22:14:13.564482-10:00</modified>
    <unit meter="1" name="meter" />
    <up_axis>Y_UP</up_axis>
  </asset>
  <library_materials>
    <material id="_" name="SVG_x0020_Importer_x002F_SolidColor_x002F_SolidColorOpaque">
      <instance_effect url="#_-fx" />
    </material>
  </library_materials>
  <library_effects>
    <effect id="_-fx" name="SVG_x0020_Importer_x002F_SolidColor_x002F_SolidColorOpaque">
      <profile_COMMON>
        <technique sid="common">
          <phong />
        </technique>
      </profile_COMMON>
    </effect>
  </library_effects>
  <library_geometries>
    <geometry id="_-5054" name="Tiger_x0020_Instance_x0020_-5054">
      <mesh>
        <source id="_-5054-positions">
          <float_array id="_-5054-positions-array" count="47775">

Using Cheetah3D 7.0b15, MBPro®-Nvidia650_16GB DDR3
Greatly appreciate your time to look into this.
 

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I have no clue why you think this will work without UVs.
I mapped the tiger picture in frontal projection to the bunch of meshes (I know - not what you´re after - but it works as you can see and without UVs it didn´t work in Unity/Preview.app either.)

Cheers
Frank
 

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CpH said:
An experiment using C3D Collada import turned up undesired result, else it appears fine in Apple Preview, Houdini, & Unity. It's a phong flat shaded polygon object of a popular Tiger head with normals pointing towards the camera. Any ideas why the colorized polygons are not rendering in the view?
Click to expand...

Hi,
I've looked into the file and it saves colors in a quite uncommon way. It uses polygon vertex colors. But Cheetah3D so far just supports vertex colors and I'm not sure if I will add support for polygon vertex colors since there is not to much practical usage for them. Since this the first time I've seen a model with polygon vertex colors I guess that this feature is rarely used.

I would also recommend Franks method.

Bye
Martin
 
Thanks for the heads up, polygon vertex colors was exactly what I was hoping to work with in C3D because I need to be able to manipulate the colors at runtime in Unity for effects and such that I can't achieve with pixels shaders/textures.

My workflow currently imports a vector .svg from Affinity Designer using a Unity SVG importer extension then export to Collada .dae for mesh simplification and model adjustments/animation. Then reimport .jas/.fbx or .dae back into Unity scene for script to mesh color triggering/lighting effects.
 
CpH said:
Thanks for the heads up, polygon vertex colors was exactly what I was hoping to work with in C3D because I need to be able to manipulate the colors at runtime in Unity for effects and such that I can't achieve with pixels shaders/textures.
Click to expand...

v7 supports vertex colors (via vertex color tag) which is the more common way. In your case vertex colors would be fully sufficient too. I'm not sure why polygon vertex colors were used.

Bye
Martin
 
Hi,
I've improved my FBX and Collada importers for Beta 16. Now they convert polygon vertex colors to vertex colors. That's not a 100% lossless conversion but it should be better than nothing.

In your case it works pretty well.

Bye
Martin
 

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radiosity tag

Shift Studio said:
I'm linking a file that shows the settings I needed to adjust to make a MakeHuman character render properly in C3D v7.0b14 using Falcon render engine or Cheetah render engine with 'radiosity' turned on.

The material settings and render tag settings are for the eyelashes, eyebrows and hair.

I believe they were all necessary, but if there is further info, please post it.

a link to sample file >>
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1js6a5v0z7bex5a/Man 1.zip?dl=0

I hope this helps.
--Shift Studio.
Click to expand...

Hi Shift Studio,
thanks for your advices. It helps a lot. I could improve my make human character render. But now I got an other problem:
Where ist the radiosity tag in V7?:confused:
Probably you already discussed that?
regards
 
Controlletti said:
Hi Shift Studio,
thanks for your advices. It helps a lot. I could improve my make human character render. But now I got an other problem:
Where ist the radiosity tag in V7?:confused:
Probably you already discussed that?
regards
Click to expand...

You're welcome.

Using Cheetah renderer, radiosity is enabled in the renderer properties.
Using Falcon renderer, radiosity is enabled by default (I believe)

--shift studio.
 
Controlletti said:
Hi Shift Studio,
thanks for your advices. It helps a lot. I could improve my make human character render. But now I got an other problem:
Where ist the radiosity tag in V7?:confused:
Probably you already discussed that?
regards
Click to expand...

I'll add to Frank's reply. The Falcon Render Engine doesn't have Radiosity as it's kind of a built in function for the way a PBR renderer works.
 
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