Thursday, February 23, 2006

Some more work done

Hi,

I realized that the standard edition of visual studio does not support version control. Ok I will live without then.
I converted the code for poly to levelset conversion to vray functions. Should be faster for polygon-heavy objects. I also tried to optimize the speed further and found several unnecessary lines. I think it's as fast as I can get it now. At least faster than the previous versions.

I again have crashes with transparent shaders. I had this with the very first versions, too. But I thought I had figured that out long ago.

I did a test with some of the new vray features. VraySun and VraySky. They are very cool and work together with the ISO Surfaces without problems.


For this image I also added Caustics, Gi Caustics(refractive and reflective),Lightcache for secondary bounces. Everything interacted nicely with the ISOs.

Some cool feature with the VRaySky is that if you put it in your viewport background. You get kind of realtime update for the viewport. Move the sun and the sky color changes. Very cool. The new renderelements are also really fantastic.

That's it for today.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Ready to rumble again

Hi,

after all the problems with the HD crash I'm finally back to normal conditions. I even got the new VRaySDK for the upcoming VRay builds. I should look for a good tool for version controlling. This is still a weak point. Microsoft SourceSafe is much too expensive for a home project. I am considering either CVS, SVN or Perforce. All of them free for one-client projects.
But now to the ISO Project. I think I will try Perforce first.

The HRLE Compression of the Voxelgrid is still broken. But with the new polygon to levelset version I didn't run out of memory yet. So I am putting this not to top priority. First I want to gain some more speed.

For the poly to levelset conversion I am using the RayMeshGrid Interface from the MaxSDK to do ray mesh intersections. What a stupid idea if I have the fastest raytracer at hand;). So I am trying to convert the code to use Vray methods. If I can do that I am expecting some speed increase for the conversion phase.

I saw that the top resource site for 3dsmax maxplugins.de started a blog, too. Here's the link:
http://maxplugins.blogspot.com/

Should be the daily dose for every 3dsmax user.

Best Regards,

Dieter

Keywords: levelset, implicit surface, Isosurface, VRay, 3dsmax, raytracing