Posts made by bjornkn

Nice link to lych gates. Thanks
Interesting topic.
We do have them in Norway too, but I wasn't aware of their function in the past, and afaik we don't use such a specific name for it.
Here's a nice, old one:
http://norske-kirkebygg.origo.no/-/bulletin/show/238188_ringebu-stavkirke#

Interesting (and noce job!)
I had to look it up too
Lych = corpse, and in Norwegian corpse = lik (pronounced 'leek')
Can't say I have heard a Norwegian term for such a Lych gate though - and neither have Google Translate..

I have never cast anything in chocolate, but I have made a few plaster moulds for casting ceramics/porcelain teapots, vases, reliefs etc. If that Chrysler building was to be cast in porcelain the mould would have to be split into at least 4 separate pieces (more if there are inset windows in the concave parts), and some of the tinier details would have to be cast/modeled separately and assembled afterwards.
When casting procelain in plaster moulds you pour liquid porcelain into the assembled mould, let it stay there for a few minutes, and pour the liquid out again. The dry, porous plaster mould causes a skin of clay to be stuck to the inside of the mould - the thickness depends on the dryness of the mould and the time spent inside the mould before pouring out again. I'm sure such a procedure would not work with chocolate? Another moulding technique with clay is to push soft clay into plaster mould parts, and then assembled when dried slightly (or even when still quite soft).
All the cast chocolate I've seen looks like it has been cast in (usually 2) parts that are assembled afterwards.
If I should make such a building from chocolate I think I would make a simple 3D model and unfold into separate parts to be printed on paper as templates. Then I would maybe make (3Dprint?) one or more "roller pins" with "windows" to stamp into slightly soft chocolate sheets (if that¨s possible ie?)? Or maybe make some flat window moulds for stamping (or casting?)? I think that making full 3D moulds for several such big buildings would be very expensive and complicated.
It all depends on the level of details, and the level of realism?
Sounds like a fun project though
I love such off the MoR projects

You should definitely talk to the client to find out what they need.
Maybe they just need a simple 3D model that they can make templates from which they just cut out chocolate sheets, and then do all decoration by hand?
The only 3D food project I've been involved in was when I made 3D model of our local old fortress which I printed templates for on an A2 printer. Then we built it in ginger bread with my son and his class almost 10 years ago. As you can see from the attached photo they did all the decoration/details "in post"
It was a great project for those 10 years old kids, and tasted good too

But if they need all details in the model, and wants to make one more than one "copy", I would definitely check out the prices for 3D printing and/or cnc for mold making.

Are you looking for crowd animations then? Or with some intelligence built-in - like Massive?

There's a fun crowd tutorial here: http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/24hours_training.php (search for crowd in the text - it's an ftp link (ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Crowd.mov)to a 12 min tutorial). Very, very simple to set up, but very convincing at a distance - and quite Frankensteinish closer up
Here are some other animations done with HDinstance, an instancing plugin for LightWave that lets you instance thousands of animated characters, vehicles, forests full of million-poly trees etc: http://www.happy-digital.com/instance_videoClips.php?videoClips=0
I'm sure there are similar tools for Max too?
I don't use Max, but I thought that it included automated rigging/animation tools, like BiPed?

It would be nice to have some better animation tools in SU, as well as importing animated objects, but at the same time I'm a bit ambivalent about it. It could easily ruin the nice and simple GUI, and at the same it will always have some limitations that other "full" 3D programs, like Max, Maya, Lightwave, Blender etc don't have, mainly the lack of ability to handle millions of polys, and powerful animation. I'm surprised that most users here apparently are rendering externally via SU plugins, instead of in external programs, because then you are still limited by SU memory/poly limits, and you don't get the benefits from external programs animation capabilities neither. It sure is convenient using Twilight etc, but although it renders very nice images it is really not a full substitute for programs like Lightwave etc.
But that was a digression I'm afraid

BTW, Messiah users are a generally very satisfied and happy user group, which I believe means that the program is as great as they say it is?

I'm afraid it is probably a user problem
When importing DWG you need to tell SU what units are being used in the model.

@Alan: Your models are great, as always
How would you get rigged/animated people to animate/work inside SU?
BTW, I bought Messiah a few months ago for $40 while they were running their massive campaign, but I haven't even looked at it yet - just installed it.

@srx: I suppose that with two such power hungry graphics cards you'd need at least 1kW PSU then?

@mitcorb: PSU is the only thing I've had to replace (twice!) on this 6 year old PC. I did change the graphics card too, but it wasn't really needed..
SSD is supposed to have matured a lot the last years?
After doing a little research it looks like 2TB and above HDDs are typically a lot less reliable than SSDs?
My biggest drives now are 1.5 and 1TB (externals), and I've never had any trouble with any of them. The trouble is with the internal 160GB IDE system drive.
And the prices have dropped a lot for both SSD and huge HDDs recently.
It is always so difficult to choose !

1 GB seems to most common, but I think I would go higher for GPU rendering.

Here's my shopping list so far.
Anything "wrong" there?
Maybe faster RAM? Hard to find 4x8GB RAM.
More Watts? Fans? Water cooled?
Win7 Ultimate?
I guess I should look around a bit before buying?
I think I remember that there were some problems with some chipsets and combos with Sandy Bridge?

Intel Core i7-2600K Processor
Cooler Master CM 690 II Advanced cabinet
Cooler Master GX 750W PSU ATX 12V V2.31, 80 Plus, 9x SATA
MB MSI Big Bang-Marshal B3,
Corsair Dominator DHX DDR3 1333MHz 16GB Kit w/4x 4GB XMS3 DHX,
EVGA GeForce GTX 550Ti 2GB PhysX CUDA PCI-Express 2.0, GDDR5, 2xDVI
Corsair SSD Force Series F115, 115GB SATA2, 2,5", 285MB/275MB/s
2x Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB, 3,5" SATA 6Gb/s, 64MB Cache, 5900RPM
Samsung DVD±RW Burner, SE-S084F USB 2.0, DVD±R:
OS Microsoft Windows 7 Pro NO OEM, 64bit

I wouldn't think that a $50 graphics card with 512MB RAM would do the i7 CPU any justice?
It's actually the second cheapest card at my supplier.

What exactly is the requirement for Theas graphics (GPU rendering) card?

It looked pretty easy from that tiny stamp image, but then I had a look at this page with some more photos: http://www.dedece.com.au/products/Knoll-Studio/Seating/Chairs/Bertoia-High-Back-Chair/1258?showAllimage=1
Suddenly it looks a little less easy...
But it certainly is doable in basic SU, although using some plugins may make it a lot easier. Like Joint Push Pull, Amorph, Artisan, TIGs EE tools etc.

It looks nice, but not very comfortable BTW

I'd love to see some speccs too, of an uptodate i7 system with graphics, MB, SSD? etc.
I'm fighting with BSDs almost every day now on my 6 year old (never had such an old PC before..) custom XP32 box.
Was originally waiting for the new AMD Bulldozer, but it looks like it is delayed, and I can't really wait much longer... Then I suppose i7 2600K is the one to buy?

It is very quick to reorder object hierarchies with the Outliner tool. Are you using that tool?
Also, if you put all your groups for each floor on its own layer, and don't make a big group of the entire floor, you could quite easily turn layers/floors on/off and select and move objects across layers.
But if you want to move individual edges/faces you'd still have to go inside groups. I don't know if it is possible to make such a plugin.

Sounds like you need to change your way of working with layers, groups etc? And to start using named groups/components and Outliner? The way you describe that other 3d modelers do it is exactly the way I'd do it in SU, although usually (but not necessarily) with groups/components instead of with lines and faces.

Sounds like you're not taking advantage of the "Hide rest of model" command?
I use a shortcut for it (H and Shift+H for hide/show similar components), and toggle visibility for the rest of the model on/off all the time while editing groups/components.
Outliner is also great for keeping your groups organized.

And that is exactly why PhotoScan is such a wonderful plugin/tool for such buildings like those in Trondheim (and other stuff)
There is no way you can make any even slightly accurate model from one single photo without making some assumptions, like that some corners are square. With two or more photos you can calculate a points 3D position in 3D space and don't need to make any assumptions about the objects/buildings.
In SU it is pretty easy to place any model into a background photo if you surround it with a helper cube with square corners that can be used for the position and perspective aligning.

I've made several .bat files that I locate in a utils folder.
Then I add a shortcut to each of them and add those shortcuts to the SendTo folder.
Then I can just right-click a file or folder and "send" the file list.
I then create temp txt-file, open it and delete it again. Your text editor will keep the data, and then you just save it wherever you want it.
Here's a typical .bat file code:

cd /D %1
dir /a /b /S /o;gn >fil-liste-recSortMappeNavn.txt
fil-liste-recSortMappeNavn.txt
del fil-liste-recSortMappeNavn.txt

In addition to undistorting your photos it is usually much easier to get good perspective matching if you don't shoot straight on the wall, but rather aim your camera at a corner. Then you get perspective lines on both red and green axes. One pixel up/down on your parallel perspective lines will affect the matching a lot when shot straight on like with your photos.

Sounds like this may be a problem with vRay?

SU does not use 2-point perspective on Photomatch BTW, and it does not distort the view/photo.
It is actually a problem with Photomatch that it does not undistort the photos.
All lenses/cameras have some distortion, mainly radial, usually barrel on wide angle lenses and the opposite on teles.
And all sensors have some shift/offset (ie no sensors are placed perfectly in the center), both p&s and dSLRs, even the best and most expensive dSLRs. My high-end p&s cameras actually have their sensors a bit better centered than my dSLR.
Panorama stitching software like PTgui, which I use a lot, calculates these distortions with 3 parameters for radial distortions and 2 for shift (+ shear, which I believe is mainly for scanned photos). Those parameters are used for undistorting the photos before stitching.
Those parameters are also calculated and applied by photogrammetry software like Tgi3D PhotoScan. The photos are then undistorted when exported to the SU file, and the result is that very high accuracy can be achieved, because straight edges will appear as straight on the photos too, instead of curved as they may have been on the originals.
When using Photomatch with normal photos you will often find that edges that should have been straight are actually curved on the photos, like vertical walls/corners. It is difficult to insert new objects into a photo that is heavily distorted - the ultimate being a fisheye photo.
Many 3D programs, like Lightwave, have "real" cameras that actually distorts the rendered output to fit with the distorted photo backgrounds. PhotoScan etc do the opposite and undistorts the photo backgrounds instead, which makes it easy to model/use in SU.
That said, Photomatch is a great tool as long as you don't have heavily distorted photos, and know 100% that the red/green perspective helper lines are placed on horizontal lines that are exactly 90 degrees to each other. Very often in a city the block corner buildings are not 90 degrees, but follow the streets..
With PhotoScan you'll have no such problems with neither distorted photos nor non-90 degrees corners.

Have you moved the axis/origin to a lower corner of your model, and aligned the red/green axes before loading the PhotoMatch image? That really helps when aligning things. If your model does not have 90 degree corners and vertical/parallel walls you could make a temporary cube to help when aligning.
And yes, it is perfectly possible to achieve the same settings for the camera as the one assigned by Photomatch. It's just a position, rotation and focal length (fov) setting.
When rendering you should us the same height as the height of the photo, and then it's much easier to make a composite afterwards, and probably also with Vray rendering (which I don't use).