By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Monday, October 22, 2001 - 08:54 am:

ok, i seem to be running into various problems, but this is really my first outing with voxels in OS X.
i have just done a logo in hypervoxels and wanted it to look like liquid, and naturally liquid has trnsparency to it, but no matter what i do i could not get the voxels to render transparent at all, all my settings are right as far as i can see but is there anything that i could be missing or is this a mac bug.
cheers for any reply's.

By Bernard Brown (Bb13) (24.25.227.133) on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 - 03:10 am:

I did a tutorial in "The Lightwave 6.5/7.0 Project Handbook" and was able to produce transparent hypervoxels liquid. In the HyperVoxels 3.0 panel under the Shading/Basic tab, turn up the Transparency and Translucency settings. I did however find a flaw...when you have a HyperVoxel with Reflection applied to it, I must disable Ray Trace Reflection in the Rendering Options panel or else I get weird colored dots all over the image where there should be shiny smooth transparent liquid. (see image):



The same frame rendered with ray Trace Reflection turned off in the Rendering Options panel gives this result:



So I guess this means if you have a collision object (or any other objects in the scene for that matter) and it has a reflective surface, it will not be rendered with reflection????....I hope this is not the case. Anyone have the proper technique for this?

Bernard

By Bernard Brown (Bb13) (24.25.227.133) on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 - 03:13 am:

Oh, PS - Using OS 10.1, LW7.0b

Bernard

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 - 03:18 am:

oooops!

yeah i had all transparency/lucency setting up and could not get it to work,.....but stupid me, i had Fast Fresnel on to enhance the look and got my settings the wrong way round, so the trans parency was around to the sides but was hidden by the reflection setting in the FF, so a quick switch and the problem was cured, i'll post a pic in a bit.
i've not tried collision though.

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 - 03:35 am:

here's the pic

By tim anderson (Tim) (66.26.104.18) on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 - 07:19 am:

bernard,
had the same thing happen to me, the colored pixel thing.
never was able to figure out what was going on and eventually
tossed in the towel due to a rapidly approaching deadline.
and just did the darn thing by hand
now i will go back and see if i can get it to work properly.
how in the hell did you ever think that it might be raytracing?
good catch...

By Julian Johnson (Julianjohnson) (158.152.33.115) on Wednesday, October 24, 2001 - 04:46 am:

Hi Bernard,

I can't duplicate this at all with reflections, but I can if I turn Full Refraction on (under 9.2.1 7b). In a similar scene to yours with HVs sliding down a collision object with both set to reflect it seems fine (unless I turn on Full Refraction). It's odd because HVs are a post process effect which means they independently raytrace reflection and refraction irrespective of the settings you have in the global Render Options panel. That is, if you have the HV Environment options set to one of the raytrace options, then they'll raytrace always. So, turning off raytrace reflection *shouldn't* matter. Strange.

Julian
The Mac Lightwave Resource Page
http://www.exchangefs.co.uk/lightwave/index.htm

By Evan Ingersoll (Ingersol) (206.243.178.198) on Wednesday, October 24, 2001 - 01:33 pm:

I've experienced the same problem with refracting HVs. After much torn hair, I stripped my scene down to one hypervoxel sphere and one polygon for "ground." As long as I kept the ground plane smaller than 2m square, I was fine. Stretch it larger than that and the image refracted in the sphere would break up into random color-noise. (this was all with Full Refraction on, in LW6.5b/OS9.1) I don't remember if I was raytracing reflection or not at that point, but I'll check.

Evan

By Evan Ingersoll (Ingersol) (24.91.197.122) on Wednesday, October 24, 2001 - 05:50 pm:

OK, retitle the thread "Voxels are Possessed!" I just tried to recreate the color noise with my new setup. Good news - no luck. Bad news - instead, I get BlueVoxels, as below. Picture one, Full Refraction off. Picture 2, Full Refraction on. No other differences.


Full scene/setup description available on request.

Oy,
Evan

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Thursday, October 25, 2001 - 03:11 am:

not had that, in fact i have been playing with hypervoxels since the start of this pot and not had any more problems, all seems to be behaving fine with refraction on or off.
using OS X

By Julian Johnson (Julianjohnson) (193.128.225.131) on Thursday, October 25, 2001 - 06:57 am:

The full refraction bug only seems to surface in 7b 9.2.1 when the hypervoxel(s) occludes another object. As below:



You can try the scene for yourself at:

http://www.exchangefs.co.uk/lightwave/refraction.zip

It'd be interesting to see if this is specific to certain setups.

Julian
The Mac Lightwave Resource Page
http://www.exchangefs.co.uk/lightwave/index.htm

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Thursday, October 25, 2001 - 09:17 am:

just thought i'd ask, but is that texture a procedural or an image map? as it only affects the area with the texture in.

also on a not with hypervoxels, and yeah i know the manual says you cant but doe any one know how to stop shaows falling ver them, i have done some fire but i have a logo over the top and it casts a show over the fire, which obviously would not happen.

By Julian Johnson (Julianjohnson) (193.128.225.131) on Thursday, October 25, 2001 - 09:41 am:

Mike - it's an image map (.psd) but it's only there as a reference point for the refraction. The same artifacts occur without a texture provided you have geometry behind the refracting object...

Julian
The Mac Lightwave Resource Page
http://www.exchangefs.co.uk/lightwave/index.htm

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Thursday, October 25, 2001 - 10:13 am:

ok
just done some tests and got no artifacts here are my images

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Thursday, October 25, 2001 - 10:22 am:

oops should have reduced the size of the images there

ok
1: full refraction off
2: refraction on
3: off
4: off
5: off
6: on

various refraction settings and ray trace refraction turned on in render settings
the only other thing i changed from your setting was to change the enviroment settings to ray tracing and back drop for reflection and refraction, they were at ray tracing and spherical map.
my system for your info is :-
G4 dual 500mhz
1gb ram
Os X 10.1 build 5L14 ( the recent security update version)
Lw 7.0b
hub running

By Julian Johnson (Julianjohnson) (193.128.225.131) on Thursday, October 25, 2001 - 11:10 am:

Mike - many thanks for taking the time with that. I guess there's something up with my install of OSX 7b. Originally, the artifacts only appeared under OS9.2.1 (did you check OS9 btw?). But, to compare with yours I did them again under OS10.1 (changing the render options to raytrace and backdrop) and got this with Full Refraction turned on :-) (which takes us right back up to Evan's post!).



On the downloadable scene I'd deliberately made the backdrop blue even though the gradient backdrop should override it (as it does when you set it to backdrop only).

I'm on a DP800/10.1 5G64

Julian

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Friday, October 26, 2001 - 03:06 am:

there was one thing i did notice with the install of LW on OS X.
i had to reinstall al the plugins for layout and modeler from the edit plugins list, it seemed as if it was using the old plugin reference from either the initial LW 7 release or from the os 9 version. doing a scan directory of the plugins for both layout and modeler in OSX seemed to fix any issues i had, though i never saw the blue render problem but did have some problems with hypervoxels not launching or crashing layout when i tried to open the properties panel.
little warning dont do a scan directory of the swift 3d plugin folder cos that will crash lightwave, you have to do that as an individual plugin addition.(thats only if you have swift3d that is)
also make sure you do a scan directory of the legacy plgins folder as they may contribute if they are not matching correctly.


sorry ididnt try it in 9 as i have a bit of work going here and have been in OS X exclusively and as such have had no probs. if i get a chance i will have a look.

By Evan Ingersoll (Ingersol) (206.243.178.198) on Friday, October 26, 2001 - 08:35 am:

I just rendered out the test scene at work (thanks, Julian!) and got the same results as Mike S. - that is, it all works. Which is odd, because aside from the number of processors, my work setup is the same as my old home setup; LW 6.5b on OS 9.1. At work, on a G4 500DP, it runs fine; at home, on a G4 400, I (used to) get exactly that sno-globe phenom from Julian's post. Of course, now with 7b and 10.1 I get the blue effect instead.
On plugins, I did have to go and rescan folders after moving my content directory on OS10, and I didn't bother scanning in Legacy plugins. I'll give that a try...

Evan

By ~@~ (Phong) (66.81.46.16) on Saturday, October 27, 2001 - 07:54 am:

g4dp500/1.5/OS-X.1/LightWave 6.5b & Julian's 'HyperV' test (note: same setup as Mike, including updates, with a little more memory and 6.5b):

1) full refraction off = get same picture as Mike and Julian.

2) full refraction on = "The application LightWave has unexpectedly quit."

3) start over with full refraction on = get #1 result.

4) change to refraction off = get #1 result.

5) change to refraction on = get top of Mike's picture 1 with bottom of Mike's picture 6.

Switch to OS 9.2.1 & LightWave 6.5b

1) full refraction off = "The application "LightWave" has unexpectedly quit, because an error of type 1 occurred." The machine is frozen and the USB devices (keyboard/mouse/shuttlepro) will not respond (1 Gig memory allocated to layout and nothing else running).

2) hard reboot - full refraction on = Machine freezes and no USB devices.

3) remove all devices from machine with exception of Apple mouse and keyboard - hard reboot - Cinema Display goes black and flashing light begins - shutdown/hard reboot - full refraction off = Machine freezes and no USB devices again.

4) hard reboot (devices still removed) - load current scene I am working on = Renders fine.

5) add occluded.lws to 'my' scene above - refraction off = get my picture plus small rectangular white background with black lines grid, no sphere, and no crash.

6) add 'refraction on' to above scene = same as #5 above.

7) load occluded.lws (by itself & no devices, as above) with refraction off = renders Julian and Mike's #1 picture.

8) same as above with refraction on = get picture #1 and no crash.

9) same as above with Ray Trace refraction/reflection/shadows/extra optimization set on = machine freezes and hard reboot needed.

I am glad somebody else brought this up, even though it was under 7.x, as I have had problems with hypervoxels implemented that would consistantly crash the g4.

If anyone else is using 9.2.1 and 6.5b, I would appreciate a similar test to see if your g4, 9.2.1, LightWave 6.5b, and hypervoxels work.

Thank You In Advance

By ~@~ (Phong) (66.81.27.253) on Saturday, October 27, 2001 - 04:32 pm:

Okay, I have continued to 'play' with hyperV today and have a 'new one' on my screen. It is a rectangular box 5" x 1 1/2", white, with black text, a little round black bomb on the left, with a burning fuse... and to the right of it, the words:

Sorry, a system error occured.
"LightWave"
error type 10

(restart)

(fwiw) My project does not involve hypervoxels, I am only testing what is being discussed; i.e., this will be my last report on the subject.

By ~@~ (Phong) (66.81.60.70) on Sunday, October 28, 2001 - 08:37 am:

In order to be fair and following 'my' guidelines for a clean install, I re-installed LightWave 6.5b under OS 9.2.1 and was able to do the examples, up to page 11.13, in the LightWave 6 manual without any problems (I will finish the remaining examples later today).

After looking at the pretty blue, yellow, red hypervoxel cloud, I loaded "occluded.lws", to see if anything had changed, and managed to produce Mike's pictures 1 & 6; however, #6 was a little different for me, than the picture presented.

With the #6 picture on Viper, I pressed F9 and got another one of those rectangles with the "bomb" in it. This time stating:

Sorry, a system error occurred.
"LightWave"
CHK error
(restart)

and the machine is frozen, needing a hard reboot.

I still have a copy of OS-X.1 on the machine, but have not tried the above, under it, yet.

Yes, I failed to keep my word and posted another report, but did so because of the re-install and with hopes I could provide an "I messed up" answer; however, that was not the case.

By Julian Johnson (Julianjohnson) (193.128.225.131) on Monday, October 29, 2001 - 10:57 am:

I know this picture is going to add even more download weight to this thread (!) but it's the current state of play for me. The conclusions first (this is only for my setup after a complete reinstall of 7b for both 9.x and OSX). And, I should add, they're a little odd :-)

1. Under 9.2.1 the rainbow-snow problem still persists if I place an object behind a transparent HV with the Full Refraction checkbox on.

2. Under 10.1, with Full Refraction on, I get a blue wash (presumably the background colour which is set to this blue) across the same area but *only* if I render with one thread. The problem goes away with multiple threads but this is where it gets seriously odd: you can only provoke the blue wash error if you render the scene first in multiple threads and then switch to a single thread. It's as though some sort of caching is going on...

3. Under 10.1, it seems as though Full Refraction completely disables any refraction of any geometry in the scene! Once turned on, all I can get to refract is the backdrop.

Phong - I know it's worth little to you, but the scene rendered perfectly and reliably in 6.5b across 10.1 and 9.2.1 and 9.1 on a G3 and a G4, here.



Julian
The Mac Lightwave Resource Page
http://www.exchangefs.co.uk/lightwave/index.htm

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Monday, October 29, 2001 - 12:11 pm:

just a note to add to that, i found that if you render a scene with HV in with 8threads ( a good fast setting for dual 500mhz machines, no idea why but it seems to work) you get missed traces in the render, like the renderer is forggetting certain areas of the scene but only on the HV passes. works fine on 2 threads

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Monday, October 29, 2001 - 12:13 pm:

ps i also only rendered my tests in 2 threads

By ~@~ (Phong) (63.93.101.43) on Monday, October 29, 2001 - 07:14 pm:

Thanks Julian, your response gives me hope. I will try again next weekend.

By ~@~ (Phong) (66.52.180.178) on Monday, October 29, 2001 - 09:33 pm:

Problem resolved.

Wanting to get over this 9.2.1/6.5b hypervoxel 'hump', I started the process of getting ready for format/clean install, tonight.

In the process of 'going through the list', I discovered the settings for memory allocation and virtual memory were not in their 'normal' settings (memory/LightWave was set for 1.4 gigs and virtual memory had been allocated to a whole video scratch disk). *hummm...

Setting the memory/LightWave back to 900 megs and turning virtual memory off allowed me to reproduce most of the images above, without error messages, and the machine did not crash. I use one thread with hypervoxels under 9.x.x.

(anyhow) All seems well again... Thanks for the incentive Julian.

*hummm... The odd thing is, I remember burning a disk, a few hours before I started playing with hypervoxels and that may have played a role; as, I moved 1.4 gigs of data and broke them down into two 700+ meg blocks. I recall checking the memory and noticing 1.4 gigs were in use. Right after this, I loaded 6.5b and started testing hypervoxels.

By Bernard Brown (Bb13) (24.25.227.133) on Tuesday, October 30, 2001 - 03:26 pm:

Just noticed something about rendering HV. When I first got my DP800 I ran a lot of the benchmark scenes at 2, 4, and 8 threads and had decided that overall using 4 threads was the fastest. Well, on a whim, I tried 2, 4, 8 threads on one particular frame out of an anim I am doing and found this:

2 threads 69.4 seconds
4 threads 117.3 seconds
8 threads 149.5 seconds

What a difference!!! I guess I need to do a thread test from now on when making sure my final setup is all ready to go. Apparently HV use the processor time differently than other types of objects.

Bernard

By ~@~ (Phong) (66.52.180.176) on Thursday, November 01, 2001 - 10:24 pm:

My apologies for opening this up again, but, (smile) behaving or not, hypervoxels have taken up a lot of 'what little spare time I have' and are fun. Thanks Mike!

If someone feels like it, please try an experiment using ''OS-X.1'' and the simple example on pages 11.10 and 11.11 in the 6.0 manual (HyperVoxel Volumetrics).

After Viper produces the tri-colored image press F9 and save the image as LightWave 32 BMP.

Open iMovie and load the image.

If the image will not load, boot into 9.x.x (I use 9.2.1), open iMove and load the image.

If the image appears blue, load the scene (the one used under OS-X) into LightWave under 9.2.1 and repeat the above steps.

Does it come up blue?

There were a few more (like TGA (iirc)), but it is way past my bedtime and I have an early start.

'TIA' for any replies ...or perhaps, if anyone sees blue, start a new thread...

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Friday, November 02, 2001 - 04:20 am:

hmm, well i have now come up against another problem seeming ly linked to HV, and if it carries on my mac is going out the window, grrrrrr.
right
i am in the process of doing an animation with an explosion followed by some flames to finsh the explosion, basically based on the tutorial by dan ablan in Lightwave 6.5magic and added too, the intial explosion is with a null used for a billowing firey cloud (see magic tut) which looks nice, though getting the cloud to replicate the one in the tut is really hard as there seem to be some setting missed out from the tut, if you open the scene file from the cd it looks fine, input the same settings into a new scene with a new null and the cloud basically goes white. not good. to add to these problems i wante some fire to follow up the cloud using an emitter and sprites to keeps times down, now all the animation settings are fine,..... BUT.. the HV settings are proving to be a bit of a pain. they just wont stay on. I save the scene and save all objects, close scene open it again and poof!! check in the HV panel and the null object is deactivated. no idea why. then i get it to work, not sure how. saved ok. cool. carried on working added some jolt and that wont work (though i might put that into a different thread) saved the scene saved all objects then quit lightwave and i get an error that lightwave has unexpectedly quit, and this is in OS X 10.1. erm... what?.

so i double check my scene and all my HV setting have gone, even after saving the file and objects.
now i might try this later but has anyone replaced the updated HV plugin from 7b with the one that come on the CD with 7? i did seem something about some plugin working ok again when they where replaced this way.
btw i did try and rescan all my plugins just in case the path or prefs had become corrupted but still no joy.
yeah HV's are cool but they are also hard work. and it would seem mad that you cant have more than one Hv setting in a scene.
also the jolt thing is a pain.
any views on this?
btw thx to everyone in this forum i have learnt sooooo much recently my head hurts

By ~@~ (Phong) (66.52.181.109) on Friday, November 02, 2001 - 08:06 am:

Mike:

Try this: make a duplicate of the objects/scene you are using, rename them, load the duplicate scene, and add your changes to the various hypervoxel pop-ups/etc. you are using.

At this point, when you have everything added, click on File -> Save -> Save All Objects.

Clear the scene and reload it (the changes should be there).

hth

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Friday, November 02, 2001 - 08:23 am:

doesnt seem to do it
grrrr

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Friday, November 02, 2001 - 08:52 am:

oh, btw dont abort a render while it is in the HV pass, it seems to take longer to stop this way than actually letting it finish the HV pass.
weird!

By ~@~ (Phong) (66.52.181.109) on Friday, November 02, 2001 - 12:37 pm:

Mike:

You probably did this, but I left out a step. After 'Saving All Objects' -> one should "Save Scene As", then 'clear'.

As I typed this in, I tried it, and am sorry to say it worked over here. (fwiw) When 'stuff' like this starts showing up here, I start considering a format (required now if security update applied previously) and re-install of X.1.

(btw) If anyone could answer this, I would appreciate it.

Under 6.5b/X.1 with "Viper" and "Show Rendering in Progress" enabled, the 'percentage' of Rendering volumetrics (x %) sometimes appears and sometimes does not (with the same scene). ???

Another thing I am noticing is a pattern in X.1, under 6.5b, where, if I use (for example) 16 sets of images, and modify them 16 times, where each frame takes 1 hour +/- 48 minutes to render, by the TIME I get to the 3rd set, usually about image two, I get: "The application LightWave has unexpectedly quit" message and have repeated this.

The 'work_around', I use, is reboot after 2 sets and do two more. My experience tells me something, perhaps, is not 'flushing' properly, as it also appears memory related.

TGA output from 6.5b does not seem to be able to be imported by iMovie under X.1. The only one 'it' seems to like is JPG.