lyes - This effect looks great! :) So this is the basic setup?

1) mirror the object across the XY axis
2) make a big ground plane with hole trimmed in the center
3) place a sky image beneath the mirrored object

jonah

hi jbshorty yes like that and you can add transparent picture with a bit off color in the hole (big ground plane with hole)
as in the picture the big plane with hole will cover the big sky

lyes wrote: "...you can add transparent picture with a bit off color in the hole..."

Yep, that's what I'd been doing in Rhino. I set the ground plane material slightly transparent to control the "reflection" amount of the mirrored objects. But I hadn't thought to use an image of the sky beneath it. It's a nice effect. But it's hard to find good pictures for interior ceilings. I will need to walk around with camera and take pictures like a tourist... :)

And it could be taken one step further to use an alpha for simulating puddles of water on the ground plane too... :)

hi jbshorty good idea for water effect
i have an update material reflection i took marbel picture made it a bit transparent (200 from 255 not transparent in paint.net)
nice effect have a look

i dont know if Micheal can do some tune up for pictures like :

snape to pictures edges and corners when drawing and make it on or off in the snape setting
setting for each picture like transparency and position (above ,below,with) instead off globale that will make it easy instead off going to photo editing and back to moi
possible to select picture and see it as line from others views to move it
copying picture inserted
and edit directory for each picture (ex: if you move picture to another folder MOI will not see it any more only the frame is there) some how to look for it and keep the picture setting
like that when you open 3dm file in MOI with picture setting just point to the folder where the pictures are
and finaly a way to save the pictures inserted in a folder

Hi lyes,

> (ex: if you move picture to another folder MOI will not see it any
> more only the frame is there)

One way you can fix that is to move the picture to be in the same folder as the .3dm file.

If MoI cannot find the picture with the file path that was stored, it will also check in the same folder as the .3dm file to see if it can find it there.


Many of the other things you are requesting would probably also have a side effect of making the UI for dealing with images more complicated than it currently is... So it would likely take quite a lot of design effort to try and incorporate all that additional functionality without making things much harder to use for simple tasks, if that was even possible.

The current background images mechanism is intended not really for special effects like you're using here, but more as visual guides for drawing on top of.

Maybe it would be best to have something that was oriented for effects to be separate somehow from the current one...

- Michael

Experimenting with some other lighting stuff.

This one gives a kind of metallic feel:



Also when moving around it's a little different:



- Michael

HI Michael thanks for the tip , looking good

Hey I like this metallic one Michael :)
Not as good as a true env image map but its really close !

Hi DesuDeus,

> Not as good as a true env image map but its really close !

Well actually it is using a type of environment mapping to get that effect so yes - definitely very close to environment mapping since it is environment mapping... :)

- Michael

And Danny's long awaited feature...... KANGAROO STRIPES! :O

Actually it looks like the "metal mode" may work pretty well similar to a stripe analysis.

For example here's a juncture:



Regular circular fillet (tangent continuity):



G2 blend fillet (curvature continuity):




Probably a Zebra mode would be good too for doing a more detailed focus on shaping, but this metallic mode would probably be easier to do regular work with than trying to do normal work (other than just examination) in zebra mode.

You may need to drive up the display mesh density even higher though to do a really detailed analysis, I'm not sure yet how to manage that.


- Michael

It really does seem to have a good metallic feel, here's another shot:



- Michael

Little MoI is not a baby anymore. I think I'm going to cry just a bit.

@Michael
What I mean when I say its "pretty close" is that your environement map is good but I think you see too much "steps" in the gradients!
You should make two different metal looks, one non-blurred like chrome and one blurred but with non-visible "steps" , a smoother blur.

Here's two example from Auxpecker (all rights reserved)

First is a non-blurred chrome


Wich produce this kind of result



And here's the second example, anodized metal (could be also a 80% blurred metal) wich can be any color (or white for uncolored metal)


Wich produce this kind of result



As you see its two very different results, your environement map is between the two, its blurred but not enough maybe.
You said it was a 6 side cube image map but when I look at your screenshot it looks like different spot lights pointing at the model with not enough falloff, you can clearly see in the white part a circle shapes just like a circular gradient in photoshop but with not enough area between the dark and light colors. I hope you understand what I said :)
Can you share the image you are using? Or at least a screenshot of it?
Im annoying I know, always commenting and suggesting stuff :) Your tests are already looking very good Michael.

Definitely looking better. I think using light definitions to auto generate the cubemap is rather limiting, which is why I was interested in loading the map (in this case 6 textures) from disk. These days it's trivial to just jump into 3ds max, maya, modo, etc. and generate environment maps that work better. Just place a camera with the proper projection settings in the middle of a scene and render it out. You can see how easy it was to make the chrome example DesuDeus posted, and the results are much more appealing, imo. Plus you aren't limited to standard lighting setups and can achieve any kind of effect you want (e.g. place the camera inside a procedurally mapped sphere and give it a soft diffuse plasma look).

Hi DesuDeus, thanks for sharing those images! But I don't really think that the examples that you show there are necessarily "better" than the one I showed, they just have some different qualities, some of which are actually undesirable.

Having some more compressed gradients actually helps to give a bit more prominent visible reflection lines, which are kind of what you want to look for when you are using the reflection as a guide for surface smoothness.

The blurry one that you show reduces the effectiveness of using reflections for that purpose.

Then the chrome one you show is maybe a little bit too unbalanced, it looks very much like chrome certainly but the visible reflection lines are all only on the top half of the environment.

I'm not only shooting for just a purely aesthetic result with this function, I'm also trying to give it some practical qualities as well.

Your comments seem to be putting a kind of "final rendering" aesthetic look above all else which is not necessarily the right direction for a kind of interactive modeling mode, really.

I can understand the desire to make things look really cool, but also you seem to have a tendency to want to place "form over function", which is not really the philosophy that is guiding MoI in general.


> Can you share the image you are using? Or at least a screenshot of it?

It's not so easy to do this because it is a procedurally generated cube map. I don't have anything set up currently to dump it to disk.


- Michael

Hi vodkamartini,

> I think using light definitions to auto generate the
> cubemap is rather limiting

Not really - it actually gives me a lot of freedom to just adjust a few parameters and then generate several variations on a basic structure.

Like for instance I may be able to have one version with the key light stronger and the fill lights lessened, one with no fill lights, and one somewhere in between.

It's also possible for me to adjust the key light direction dynamically since I'm generating all the data.

Much of this flexibility would not be so easy to handle (or probably not possible for changing of directions) if it were only based strictly on static pre-generated maps.


> These days it's trivial to just jump into 3ds max, maya,
> modo, etc. and generate environment maps that work better.

There are many MoI users who don't have any of those applications, so it is not really so great to be totally dependent on that method.

I think that will be great as an option in the future, but having procedurally generated ones is much more practical for the initial base functionality.

- Michael

I only meant it was limiting from the user's perspective (in that we can generate the same env. maps in a 3d package, plus much much more). I completely understand the advantages on your end, especially if you're dynamically updating the lights. I'm sure many people would be eager to produce and share their own maps, so I doubt those without the necessary 3d packages wouldn't stand to benefit.

You're right about the examples DesuDeus posted as being too aesthetic. I think a happy medium between pure eye candy and bland functionality can exist, with more of the interesting solutions achievable outside the confines of simple omni/directional/spot lights. I also agree that what you have now is a proper foundation, and I never meant to suggest replacing it - merely supplementing it.

Anyway, I like the improvements you're making and I'm sure I'll enjoy whatever look v2 ends up having. Keep up the great work!

Looking good Michael, where are you heading with this, are you just experimenting or are you implementing these visual options in V2 ?

Cheers

Hi Danny, well I was just doing some quick experimenting with some different things I can do now with the new lighting mechanism, and I just kind of happened to find that metallic look is easy for me to do now with it.

I actually tweaked just one line of code to get it, I was just thinking hmm I wonder what will happen if I do this instead and out popped that look.

So yes, I think unless something goes unexpectedly wrong I'll be able to include it as an option in v2.

This technique should work fine with old cards too, all the way back to the first GeForce or Radeon cards. I just did a quick test on an old GeForce2 and a Radeon 7500 and it is looking good there...

- Michael