tags on groups - help

tags on groups - help

When I place a tag on a group - specifically in this case, the Render tag I would expect it to effect the entire group, but it doesn't. Can anyone explain this behaviour? Same is true for the Particle Tag

in my current project (bugs again :frown, I am rendering a shadow plane separately from the rest of the render, and to do this, I need to turn on/off each of the 16 render tags.

Is there a work-around, or possibly I'm missing something?

Any advice is appreciated.
--Shift Studio.

What you doing with the render tag?

fused said:

What you doing with the render tag?

Click to expand...

I'm unchecking the 'Visible for primary rays' property - so it casts a shadow on the shadow plane, but is not visible.
I'm compositing things in Photoshop, and need the shadow separate, so I can use the 'multiply' blending mode.

Thanks,
--Shift Studio.

*** Bump ***

Any word on this, or a work-around?

It still drives me nuts :frown:

Any help is appreciated!
--Shift Studio.

Yeah sorry about that situation. I may be wrong, but I don't think there is a way to add a tag to a group / folder. It would make it easier if you could though. I usually extrude splines that I've imported and I have to put an extrude tag on all of them. I know I could import all the splines in to one object, but prefer to keep them separate for animation / moving parts. One thing you may try out if all of your render tags are set up exactly the same, is to delete all but one and then copy paste the one that's left back into each object. Not exactly what you were hoping for, but may be easier than going into each tag individually.

Swizl said:

Yeah sorry about that situation. I may be wrong, but I don't think there is a way to add a tag to a group / folder. It would make it easier if you could though. I usually extrude splines that I've imported and I have to put an extrude tag on all of them. I know I could import all the splines in to one object, but prefer to keep them separate for animation / moving parts. One thing you may try out if all of your render tags are set up exactly the same, is to delete all but one and then copy paste the one that's left back into each object. Not exactly what you were hoping for, but may be easier than going into each tag individually.

Click to expand...

Thanks Swizl, yes, that is what I do. Also I do a lot of work with smart folders, so if I have a particle array of smart folders, I can put the render tags in the source file to save some effort.

--Shift Studio.

Speaking of smart folders, I very much would like to be able to add a particle tag to a smart folder.

I have a project right now where I need to make a lot of variation, and I want to do it by making a particle array of smart folders (which also contain a particle spline) but not being able to put a particle tag on a smart folder ruins the elegantness of my plan.

Any hope on this?

Thanks,
--Shift Studio

^^ Bump again ^^

give me some hope please!

render tags on groups, particle tags, modifiers on smart folders etc.

Thx.
--Shift Studio

Another year, another ^^BUMP ^^

please, pretty please.

Another approach vs. all the render tags is to render twice — once with shadows on and once with shadows off (of course, this may involve adjusting a lot of lights...) and then using difference in Photoshop to create a shadow layer.

Producing a script that toggles all render tags on objects by name (or by their group name) would also be fairly easy.

In general, I think there are a lot of problems with the way C3D treats groups and multiple selections :-/

podperson said:

Another approach vs. all the render tags is to render twice — once with shadows on and once with shadows off (of course, this may involve adjusting a lot of lights...) and then using difference in Photoshop to create a shadow layer.

Producing a script that toggles all render tags on objects by name (or by their group name) would also be fairly easy.

In general, I think there are a lot of problems with the way C3D treats groups and multiple selections :-/

Click to expand...

Agreed - except 'fairly easy' to script doesn't apply to me as I don't know how to script

--Shift Studio.

^^Another bump.^^

^^Another bump.^^

I'm desparate for this feature! I just finished copy-pasting render tags to at least 100 objects. Render. Now I have to go turn them all off again to render a different part!!

Thanks in advance!
--Shift Studio

^^ bump 2017 ^^

Martin said:

Hi,
I'm not sure if I understood you right but I guess you just want tag inheritance. So that the properties of a tag are inherited to all it's child objects.

Tag inheritance is already on my todo list since it's currently handled not very consistent. So I plan to implement tag inheritance for all tags. But that won't make it into v7.0 anymore. That's a bigger project.

Bye
Martin

Click to expand...

Hi Martin.
Any update on progress for Tag inheritance for Groups or Layers?
Specifically the Render Tag.
I have a model with 6929 objects. I want to use the Render tag to turn off 'visibility in camera'. So that I can get just the shadow rendered.
I don't feel like 'pasting' the tag nearly 7000 times.

If 'visibility in camera' were part of the 'layers' properties, that would work just as well.

Thanks, Shift Studio.

* If all you need is a render of a single frame:
* Create a duplicate .jas, select the 7k objects and merge.
* Apply the render tag, uncheck camera and render.
* This gives you a single render of a blank scene showing shadows of the “invisible” merged mega object.

* Needless to say:
* The merge is destructive.
* This is useless for any animations.
* I assume you know that anyway and need the tags for an animated movie :frown: :frown: :frown:

Helmut said:

* If all you need is a render of a single frame:
* Create a duplicate .jas, select the 7k objects and merge.
* Apply the render tag, uncheck camera and render.
* This gives you a single render of a blank scene showing shadows of the “invisible” merged mega object.

* Needless to say:
* The merge is destructive.
* This is useless for any animations.
* I assume you know that anyway and need the tags for an animated movie :frown: :frown: :frown:

Click to expand...

Hi Helmut,
Thank you. Yes I'm just doing single frames and have been using a method very close to what you described. The main gotcha with that is I have a lot of invisible objects (in edit and render) that are used as 'working' steps to get final geometry. When merging that invisible geometry is merged too and becomes visible.

Also, when merging folders/groups, I've found I have to jump through some hoops. I can't tell you exactly what causes a merge to fail, but it happens in some instances. So I make smart folders (and nested smart folders) editable, and go from there. Sometimes I find myself making an empty polygon object and merging a folder to that. etc.
Like I say, I'm not entirely sure which objects are causing issues.

Another method I've used is exporting to another file format, one that leaves 7000 simple meshes - they can be merged and brought back the original file.

Regardless, thanks for thinking and sharing.
I'm still hoping for 'tag inheritance' someday (soon)

--shift studio.