By Kevin Cook (Bunnyman) (206.117.127.221) on Thursday, August 30, 2001 - 10:18 am:

I attended an AfterEffects conference this week and learned about a file format (RLA) that basically codes 3D objects with ID numbers, so that when you get into AE, you can manipulate sections of your render (object by object) without having to re-render. Wow! That was quite the run-on sentence!

Anyway, I haven't had a chance to mess with this yet. I talked to a LW user at the conference and he said under 6.5, the RLA format kind of works but not completely. I talked to a rep at the Newtek booth and he said that there have been "improvements" with RLA in 7.

Does anyone have any experience with this format? The guy doing the session was using either 3Dstudio or EI. And in their render panel, you could set object ID numbers for each object. LW doesn't have that from what I can see.

Any info would be appreciated!

By Kevin Cook (Bunnyman) (206.117.127.221) on Thursday, August 30, 2001 - 02:00 pm:

I did a search and found a thread on this very topic awhile back. So I'll amend my post and ask this:

Has LW improved the RLA export in 7.0? Or rendering in passes?

By Will Salley (Willmac) (66.26.122.69) on Thursday, August 30, 2001 - 03:15 pm:

Sounds like everything else in Lightwave - "it works, but not completely!"

I'd love to see that feature REALLY work though.

By Kevin S. Eldridge (Macronin) (172.137.6.161) on Thursday, August 30, 2001 - 03:47 pm:

Must have been using 3DStudioMAX, since EI doesn't support the RLA file format...

By Wesley Shawn Marshall (Wshawn) (216.99.217.42) on Friday, August 31, 2001 - 12:27 am:

RLA export still does not work properly in LW 7, at least on OS 9.0.4. I also attended AE West this week and repeatedly asked David Tracy of Newtek if the feature worked, and he said he didn't know. I took home the LW 7 demo and installed it on my G4. I was able to render out an image in the RLA format, despite the fact that half the menus were blacked out (some kind of display error, I suppose). When I brought the image into AE, I was able to isolate the object number channel and materials channel, but the z-depth channel still does not work. When selected, you get a weird moire pattern in the objects, not the white to black greyscale you should get.

Consider me annoyed.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

By adam stern (Adam) (24.76.122.7) on Friday, August 31, 2001 - 12:43 am:

I have been trying to get an answer from newtek re: rla on mac for about a year now. I've had this web page up for a while:

http://www.artifexstudios.com/zdepth

ahh well. sure would be nice to take advantage of ae's z-depth compositing features... This is one of those cases where newtek is absolutely advertising a feature that absolutely does not work on the mac.


Adam

By Xavier Mansy (Xavier) (213.132.155.200) on Friday, August 31, 2001 - 02:02 am:

I totally agree. I've asked this question to Newtek Europe without any success...By the way,could somebody tell me what is exactly "deluxe rla"?
is it different than the useless extended rla saver...

Xavier

By Arnie (Arnie) (65.184.20.249) on Friday, August 31, 2001 - 07:59 am:

The moire pattern coming from the Z-buffer is due to the Z scale stored in the buffer being much larger than AE is expecting. It is like as the Z-depth from LW goes from 1m to 2m, the AE buffer maps 0->255 several times. For a 10 meter scene, this will make a zebra-like moire pattern. AE should have some control over the range of Z values included in the image. Since there is no published, formal standard for this hack of a format, applications which use it should have some flexibility. This would not be a mac only issue, as the files should be the same from either platform.
The Deluxe RLA saver saves standard RLA images, but with 16-bit color. This is useful for some high-end compositing tools.

By Kevin Cook (Bunnyman) (206.117.127.214) on Friday, August 31, 2001 - 09:00 am:

"I was able to isolate the object number channel and materials channel, but the z-depth channel still does not work."

Do you need the z-depth channel for anything that moves on the z plane? Or do you only need the z-depth channel for things like depth of field?

By Wesley Shawn Marshall (Wshawn) (216.99.217.42) on Friday, August 31, 2001 - 01:27 pm:

The z-depth channel allows you to isolate different objects in the rendered picture based on their z-depth distance. You would then be able to isolate the different objects on different layers in AE, giving you more flexibility in compositing.

Here's an example where the inability to get a working RLA z-depth output forced me to modify my concept. I had a humanoid figure with a bunch of 1s and 0s mapped onto him; we'll call him binary man. I wanted binary man to be surrounded by a ring of 5 or 6 viewscreens; some would be in front of him, some behind him. I wanted to arc around the scene, starting in front of binary man and moving to an over-the-shoulder shot.

I could have rendered the whole scene out in LW and plopped it into AE, but I wanted to treat binary man different than the viewscreens. I wanted to use a mixture of hard light and additive transfer controls, plus some glows, to make binary man more ethereal. I couldn't just render out binary man alone in one pass and the viewscreens alone in another, because once I brought those 2 layers into AE there would be no way to keep the viewscreens in front on a higher layer and the viewscreens behind binary man in a layer under binary man.

This is how the z-depth in RLA would have helped. In AE I could set the 3D channel to "slice" the image based on its z-depth. I could have put everything between the camera and binary man on the top layer, binary man on the next lower layer, and everything behind binary man on the bottom layer.

The main limitation of the RLA format is that the 3D channel info is not aliased, so you have to do different tricks to get clean edges.

Eventually I had to build my scene with the viewscreens bunched up in front of binary man, and I had to shoot it so binary man would always be in the foreground, on "top" of the viewscreens. I rendered binary man and the viewscreens separately and kept binary man on a higher layer than the screens in AE.

I attended one of the 3D sessions at AE West in which the speaker used an RLA sequence from 3D Studio in AE, and it worked perfectly. AE seems to have no trouble reading the RLA output from that software. I wonder how Cinema 4D's RLAs work? The demo version I downloaded won't let me save an image.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

By Xavier Mansy (Xavier) (213.132.154.229) on Friday, August 31, 2001 - 04:04 pm:

thanks for the answer Arnie. Aren't you the author of the extended RLA saver? ...If I'm not wrong may I ask you for which compositing package it was build?
...if is it just a matter of buying flames or smoke :-)

xav

By Arnie (Arnie) (65.184.20.249) on Friday, August 31, 2001 - 07:13 pm:

It was tested with Digital Fusion, and an early version of effect*.

By Glen Hurd (Glenh) (141.158.54.109) on Sunday, September 02, 2001 - 08:17 am:

I've found the RLA saver to work fine on the PC -- and AE on the Mac picks up the info with no trouble. But the exact same scene rendered on a Mac results in useless Moire patterns. It's been like that for years . . .

By arthur argote (Archiea) (209.178.152.48) on Sunday, September 02, 2001 - 05:43 pm:

Hey guys,

This is absolutely a guess here so keep this in mind. I've worked with Maya/Mtor and Shake and we had a similar problem. Shake's Z support is designed to work with Maya, not renderman. We used Mtor to render Renderman out of Maya, which was incompatable with shake: Again, both should be the same, but shake was more compatable with the flavor of Z-space data out of Maya. We had to convert the z-space data to 8-bit RGB files to use as Z mattes. Another problem could arise as to whether shake/after effects accepts 8-bit grayscales or 8 bit RGB files as mattes. I'm offering this example to show the disparity between just the rendered output in "professional" software. I think taking a page out of Discreet' book is in order: they have combustion and Max working together pretty well. Since I have access to LW, shake, AE and Maya, I'll try to do a compatability test, and see what breaks out of LW. I think thats newtek's jobs, even though its not really their fault entirely.

I've been working with AE 5.0, and the only way to output the much heralded 16 bit output is with cineons. TGA, TIFF, SGI are still 8bit. Also, Shake's 16 bit output in TIFF and SGI don't work with AE, only Cineon and TGA. We b*tch and moan like its just newtek's problem, but in my experience, I've ALWAYSED had this kind of problems, especially with Adobe since Adobe assumes you only use their products for anything. I'm not saying the LW's broken RLA support is OK, its not, but its not so unusual.

And if you want to talk about buggy software, check out Nothing real's shake. Their Rotosplines are "iffy" at best, and they don't even support true 3D compositing, and they're $10K a seat....

By adam stern (Adam) (207.194.65.18) on Tuesday, September 04, 2001 - 10:10 am:

"I've found the RLA saver to work fine on the PC -- and AE on the Mac picks up the info with no trouble. But the exact same scene rendered on a Mac results in useless Moire patterns. It's been like that for years . . . "

Thanks for the info, Glen. So Arnie, If PC LW spits out the right depth information with RLA, then After Effects doesn't seem to be to blame - rather Mac LW is the culprit. Is there a way to get to the bottom of this? We could really use this feature.

Newtek speaks of feature parity from PC to Mac...Hopefully this will be true soon.


Adam

By Arnie (Arnie) (65.184.20.249) on Tuesday, September 04, 2001 - 10:35 am:

There was a bug based on the different byte order between mac and PC. That was breaking all the RLA buffers. If only the depth image is scrambled, it may be that AE has a similar problem. The files should be indentical on PC and Mac. We can verify this. In the meanwhile, you can export a depth buffer directly with the "Render Buffer Export" filter.

By adam stern (Adam) (207.194.65.18) on Tuesday, September 04, 2001 - 11:03 am:

Thanks for the info, Arnie. I've used the buffer export method for depth which seems to work fine. I'd still like to be able to use the other features the rla format offers - hopefully there's a solution.

Adam

By Arnie (Arnie) (66.88.8.234) on Tuesday, September 04, 2001 - 12:38 pm:

Which other features did you want, and which are failing currently? As I have said, in the absence of any formal statdard for extended RLA format, making all possible combinations of apps/platforms work together is an open-ended proposition. Any more data you can share can only help the process.

By adam stern (Adam) (207.194.65.18) on Tuesday, September 04, 2001 - 01:38 pm:

Hi Arnie,

Thanks for replying, and I understand the dilemma of multiple app combinations. It does seem though, that if pc lw/ae works as a combination, that mac lw/ae would be a logical one to try to get working.

Object and material ID's would be wonderful. These don't seem to work under mac lw/ae either. the biggest one is really depth, but id's would be extremely helpful.

Thanks again,


Adam

By Arnie (Arnie) (66.88.8.234) on Tuesday, September 04, 2001 - 06:07 pm:

I think someone on this exact thread said that Object and Material buffers WERE working on the mac w/ AE. If all of them are scrambled, it may just be that an old/wrong version, or some other build/distribution error is in evidence. Certainly working with mac AE is desirable. I wonder if the same RLA file will work the same on mac and PC AE? Are the same files generated by Mac and PC LW? Which buffers seem to be scrambled for which apps under which platforms?

By adam stern (Adam) (24.76.122.7) on Tuesday, September 04, 2001 - 08:43 pm:

I've cobbled together an image sequence that might help explain, and Arnie - my apologies. Material ID does seem to work properly (hooray!).The last time I tried it didn't seem to work at all, but now it does seem to isolate my object by material as seen in the screenshot of the green ball.

The rest should be self-explanatory.

comments?

Thanks,


adam

By Arnie (Arnie) (65.184.20.249) on Tuesday, September 04, 2001 - 09:18 pm:

I'm still not sure the depth image is not correct. What are the controls over this layer that AE gives? is there any way to set the min and max depth values expected in the image? Maybe your spheres are 2M in diameter, and it would work if they were 2mm?

By Wesley Shawn Marshall (Wshawn) (216.99.217.42) on Tuesday, September 04, 2001 - 11:06 pm:

After Effects does not provide a way to set the min and max values expected in the RLA image, however, I attended a 3D compositing seminar at the After Effects West conference last week in which the instructor made extensive use of RLA files exported from 3D Studio. After Effects had no problems extracting the proper z-depth info from those files.

Seeing as how After Effects is the most-used desktop compositing and effects software out there, it would be really great if LW could manage to make these files work correctly with AE. It obviously can be done.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

By Kevin Cook (Bunnyman) (206.117.127.214) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 07:39 am:

I was in the same seminar and the instructor also said that there was a limit as to how "big" your 3D world was. I think the maximum distance (depth-wise) was 10,000 meters? It was 10,000 "something."

I believe he said that if you create your objects in real world measurements, you might run into problems.

How big are those sphere objects? I'll bet they aren't that big so what I'm saying doesn't apply in this instance. But that was one of the parameters you had to stay within.

By adam stern (Adam) (207.194.65.18) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 10:32 am:

Thanks all for responding.

As Shawn mentioned there does not appear to be a way in AE to set min and max depth values. The spheres are 1m in diameter.

Can't someone at Newtek simply compare the file that PC LW outputs to the same render in Mac LW and figure out what the difference is? Maybe I'm showing my ignorance here, but I can't help asking.


Adam

By gary jaeger (Garyj) (63.143.189.30) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 11:53 am:

I haven't had luck using RLA on the Mac side either. I get the same results with the Depth. Also, is there a way to assign the object ID in Lightwave? Or does Lightwave pick the id randomly? I ask because I noticed that Lightwave assigned some ID's that seemed to be outside of the range of the AE slider.

gary

By adam stern (Adam) (207.194.65.18) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 12:24 pm:

Good question, Gary... to get the material ID to work (as in my example above) I basically had to scroll the slider until I found the ID - which seemed quite arbitrary. I've set my sliders to go from 1-256 as opposed to 1-50, which seems like a more practical range.

By Mark Whitney (Ma3rk) (12.80.34.115) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 12:28 pm:

Hey Everyone,

Chuck Baker suggested I toss a note into this discussion.

I posted some info on the alt.binaries.3d.lightwave newsgroup a day or so ago with the subject titled:

More findings with LW and RLA files.

There are some image attachments and explanation of how I got the Z-Buffer info to work with LW 6.5b and AE5.0, and apparently getting the AA to work properly as well.

M.

By gary jaeger (Garyj) (63.143.189.30) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 12:51 pm:

hmm. i guess my isp doesn't have that group. I'd love to hear how you did it.

gary

By Chuck Baker (Cbaker) (207.235.86.2) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 12:57 pm:

Hi, Mark! I was hoping you'd post the images and text here, as well...

By adam stern (Adam) (207.194.65.18) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 12:57 pm:

Thanks for the info Mark, but unfortunately this is a PC based solution. DRLA isn't available for the mac.


adam

By Mark Whitney (Ma3rk) (12.80.17.210) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 03:02 pm:

I just did Chuck. No descriptions with the images for somereason, but they're in a logical prgression from no effect then from fore ground to background.


M.

By Mark Whitney (Ma3rk) (12.80.17.210) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 03:06 pm:

Don't know what to say other than try contacing the author and see if he can be coaxed.

Of course you (we) could all needle Newtek some too. There's a lot more the format can do that still isn't enabled even with what's working at the moment.

M.

By Chuck Baker (Cbaker) (207.235.86.2) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 03:47 pm:

Thanks, Mark! The descriptions that you type in in brackets appear when the pointer is moved over the image. If you want the descriptions to appear below the images, you need to type that text in after the brackets (please note something must be in between the brackets).

I've edited the message so that the comments show under each image.

By Chuck Baker (Cbaker) (207.235.86.2) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 04:33 pm:

Also moved the post to the Tips and Techniques section...

By gary jaeger (Garyj) (63.143.189.30) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 05:50 pm:

Chuck, do you know if anybody at Newtek has used RLA with AE on the Mac side? It seems that the built-in RLA support may have some issues, or maybe we're doing something wrong on the user end of things. Either way, it would be nice to know.

gary

By Glen Hurd (Glenh) (141.158.55.148) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 10:24 pm:

Seems like there's still some confusion as to where the problem lies with RLA export and its use in AE for Mac. Here's a large picture I've assembled showing what the same scene file looks like in AE for Mac, rendered from the two different platforms. I know it's a large file, but I think it clears a lot up. The first part shows 3 perfectly black pictures (I know -- a waste of bandwidth) showing the RGB difference between PC and Mac files. There is no RGB difference (good to know).
The second section then shows how AE Mac reads the RLA data from the two different platforms. Only the Extended RLA files contained data that I could find -- saving RLA from the Render Panel seemed useless. I hope this image isn't too large to survive the forum -- forgive me if it is.

By Glen Hurd (Glenh) (141.158.55.148) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 10:30 pm:

Oops, the last picture's text should read "AE(Mac) shows PC-rendered Extended RLA file's Material ID data," not "Mac-rendered." I guess it's time to get back to work

Glen

By adam stern (Adam) (24.76.122.7) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 10:46 pm:

Glen:

I really appreciate your posting, as I'm sure others do. This really seems to demonstrate once and for all that the mac version of the extended rla plugin is definitely busted.

Newtek: possible to fix? Please?

By Glen Hurd (Glenh) (141.158.55.148) on Wednesday, September 05, 2001 - 11:05 pm:

One more thing . . .

By Chuck Baker (Cbaker) (207.235.86.2) on Thursday, September 06, 2001 - 09:06 am:

Hi, Glen! You could have corrected the message - note that right after the date and time on the message title bar there is now a little blue link - Edit. Click that to edit your messages when you need. The board formerly offered message editing by the user selecting "Edit your Profile", and the time limit was twenty minutes after posting. I revised the board template yesterday to one that has the edit button on the title bar of each message, and also extended the edit time limit to 60 minutes.

Gil Triana on the Tech staff is doing an audit of all the Mac plugins (he'll post his current results on that sometime today - he's just partway through the project) and I'll ask him to check and confirm your results in particular ASAP.

By Chuck Baker (Cbaker) (207.235.86.2) on Thursday, September 06, 2001 - 09:12 am:

Glen - Whoops - can't edit a picture! I thought you'd made wonderful use of the board's text format, font sizing, and color text features for the captions - but when I went to make the correction for you, nope, that's one big picture up there!

Silly me!

By Glen Hurd (Glenh) (63.140.21.134) on Thursday, September 06, 2001 - 10:27 am:

Thanks, Chuck. We look forward to seeing Gil's results.

Glen

By Arnie (Arnie) (65.184.20.249) on Thursday, September 06, 2001 - 12:59 pm:

It definitely looks like all the bytes are scrambled. The fact that the object and material buffers which use 2 and 1 byte per pixel (respectively) were first claimed to be working, (but are now shown to be different, but still effective) threw me off for a bit. Since we don't have access to AE, my effect* beta expired and my DF dongle went missing (with the PC!) when we moved our offices, I have been working blind. It should be straightforward to get a fixed version of the plugin together.

By Glen Hurd (Glenh) (63.140.21.134) on Thursday, September 06, 2001 - 01:06 pm:

It's great you're looking into it. This problem has existed for quite some time, and I just assumed it was too difficult to fix. If you need anyone to test your fixed version, give us a holler . . .

Glen

By adam stern (Adam) (207.194.65.18) on Thursday, September 06, 2001 - 02:26 pm:

very exciting.... looking forward to it. Thanks Arnie, Chuck, et al....I've been hoping for some movement on this for a while. Hope I haven't been too much of a squeaky wheel.

Adam

By Wesley Shawn Marshall (Wshawn) (216.99.217.42) on Thursday, November 15, 2001 - 01:20 pm:

It looks like this squeaky wheel has ground to a halt and fallen off the axle, under which some insects have made a home.

The last post on this was more than 2 months ago. Has any attempt been made to get the RLA export to work properly on the Mac?

Forgive me if this problem has been addressed on a different thread.

Thanks

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

By adam stern (Adam) (24.78.179.245) on Thursday, November 15, 2001 - 01:27 pm:

Hey Shawn,

If you take a look at the "digital confusion issues?" thread, you'll see that Arnie mentions it's been fixed in 7...however...

this is just my opinion, but we paid for this feature to work in 6. Can't newtek release a plug-in fix for this for us to download, without having to upgrade to 7? It looks like 7 carries with it a number of busted plug-ins as it is - including Digital Confusion. I'm not up to paying for broken features anymore.

adam