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ZbornToy (Taronites)

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#61

Yes, if you would make a plan that has as many polygons as there are pixels in your image, then you could get such an effect with a subdivided plane. This would then render for 1 or 2 hours on any contemporary computer before you could get to see anything and made you question more than just why this appeared like an idea before, haha! :wink:
In fact, if you had a 3d software, you’d really want to use it for all the advantages it represents over a relief (height render). Sure you won’t see such a speed for another few years and even then, including all the things that the ZbornToy can handle so quickly, you might have to wait another 5 to 8 years, but you simply wouldn’t work that way. Thinkable is what I had initially planned for this. That was to build this concept into messiah, so you could create your shading and lighting as fast as this, but then render the actual 3d content. :slight_smile:

Entertainingly enough, Messiah is dirt cheap and one of the fastest renderers in his weightclass. Maybe the fastest subdiv&displacement capable Raytracer there is. I’ve written a bunch of the shading concepts I developed for the ZbornToy into Messiah. Like the glossiness logic, which is one of my favorite innovations to shading. (invader Zim would say:“praise me, praise me”…I apologize for my stupidity, haha, but I’m just waking up. I am rather proud of some of the things I’ve come up with. For the everything else I’m either proud of Fori or Phlipp or Dan and -if I go back in time- Lyle. Only to name a few!)

As for After Effects and its high price. Well, the ZbornToy runs on any version of AfterFX starting from 5.5 I believe or at least from 6.0. I’m almost certain, that you can get such old versions for a very slimm budget. It hast to be the pro version, however, because it needs to support 16Bit. You won’t need float, which I never use myself, really, but if you had it, you’d obviously gained something for super deep and complicated content (mass scenes with little creatures until the horizion at 6k resolution might want to use floats).
We’ve most of all targeted artists, who already own After effects, of course. And I must admit, it must seem almost unfair, but definitely not so fantastically tempting, to someone, who’d have to get AE first.:confused:

#62

That’s exactly right! … … … all the way! :lol:

There are very few things I did not build in at this point. One is the shadow length concept, to ‘pretent’ we’re not working on a relief (but I will put it in later). And everything else is just so genuinely different, that it makes practically all of Zbrush’s parameters hard to combat for coherend results. ZbornToy is made to leave the control in your hands and the care within the software! If that makes any sense? Like you won’t have to care, you just design.

#63

Perhaps I don’t understand what you’re saying, but in Gelato, for example, when you tell the renderer to subdivide a mesh, it becomes a curved surface, so there isn’t a need for heavy geometry, and you can apply a displacement map to a mesh and it renders rather quickly.

Nevertheless, it looks like ZBornToy has a lot of effort put into it to make it easy to use and I think is fantastic and worth a lot.

Good luck Taron. I hope that it’s selling well, and continues to do so.

#64

Well, you need to realize, with the ZbornToy you render every single pixel at exactly the location where you had it in your depth image. THAT means, that every detail you put into on pixel level will be there and stay there (if you like)!

If you use displacement and subdivisions, you always make a compromise, while even a highly desirable one, you often or actually always lose some of the finest details. Normal maps do help, yet they won’t deliver you the actual geometry, for example and UVmapping does the rest to degrade the fidelity of the original pixel work!

Whereas, if you took an alpha grab and saved it out, you render perfectly that which you had made in Zbrush, in this case! Or actually Photoshop or Painter or anything else you would like to experiment with (it’s A LOT of fun, actually, haha…my wife had to stop me saying: People might not want to see as many “photoshop scribbles transformed into artwork” as you might think! ( :o )).

Anyway, it’s really somewhat of a different thing, that’s all and you still won’t get the speed not in many years, regardless as to how low you’d keep geometry. The procedure is radically different, while the data that gets generated at the end is frightningly similar!

Hope that was ok for reply? (I’m speaking out loudly again…:roll_eyes: )

Thanx, though! Kinda fun to discuss that stuff!:smiley:

I hope there will be plenty of sales, too, because the artists just don’t know what they would miss out on, if they skipped this one. It’s far more than just a little render tool. The things you can do with it are massive, different…so new. I could bang my head on the table for not being able of bringing that across. I so have to count on you to look at it, play with it and help communicate the real power of it. It’s beyond me, really. But I really, really thank you for saying that!

Taron

#65

Thanks for the explaination of the differences. And once again, best of luck!

#66

So how about support for animated depth maps and hence motion blur =P. I can’t imagine Zborntoy supporting functionality to something that definitely requires raytracing such as motion blur… or does it?:slight_smile:

#67

you would probley sale more if this was a adobe photoshop plugin
because photoshop is more commonly used.

#68

Before I go on answering, I wanted to squeeze in this though…somehow it echoed in my head. I wouldn’t want to say that ZbornToy is a “superior” renderer, but a different renderer. It sports features that are beyond the scope of Zbrush at this point, like the refractions and caustic projections for example.

Zbrush has it’s very own charme and therefore it would be kind of inappropriate to really compare.

Anyway, of course the ZbornToy supports animated depth maps! You can load sequences to your hearts content…but just download the quicktimes on the website! Particularely the one labeled ‘from 3dpackage into ZbornToy’:sunglasses: !
It’s really just a quicky, no textures or anything…just a plain animation. Some of you might recognize the character again! It’s one of our “game” characters we made in an old post somewhere here!

I’ve also reorganized it a little bit and the gallery has an update!
www.taronites.com

Reelsmart:Motionblur is one of my most favorite plugins out there for AfterFX and it does do a phenomenal job of motionblurring! I’ve used i on everything for the last 3 years at least, I think.:+1:

And to let you in on a little “probably”, we are currently looking at Photoshop’s new SDK! No promisses, yet, but we realize the genius of releasing it for Photoshop, toO!:bulb:

Thanx again for the great reactions! :smiley:

Taron

#69

That’s really cool! The shadows are a bit harsh though. Can you control their transparency and softness? And can the lighting be controlled from a render pass with diffuse lighting info (I think this is the part that considers light and shadow of the objects, including light color)?

#70

Good question actually. Assuming you are referring to image based lighting and using HDR images… I’m curious too…

#71

Not at all. That does work with the plugin. But what I’m trying to do is pull the lighting info from say XSI from a render pass. This would be for a multiple light setup.

#72

Haha! Well, it’s easy to forget, that it is a compositing plugin, which means, that it is in a compositing software! THat means not only that you can run multiple copies on top of eachother to add any number of light sources, you can also use other footage to mask, blend or manipulate in every way the ZbornToy output!

This is exactly one of those things, where I just know that people will need time to realize the potential and power in this!

ZbornToy itself features also rendermodi, which enable to compute only shadows, only highlights, only caustix, etc…etc… therefore you can do nearly any conceivable combination to achieve probably just exactly what you want.

Normally rendersoftware would never be able to allow such a way of functioning. You basically create the layers you want directly as you go. Laughable waiting times, as well! My worst so far was 14 sec, but I seem to remember almost a minute when we were still debugging stuff…hehehe…but we’re talking 4k renders.

Anyway, realize that it is a compositing plugin in a compositing environment. Little to know limit what you can do this way!:sunglasses:

#73

Very amazing plug in, Taron… do you have some ETA for the Mac version arribal? It seems very ineresting. I want to test it with my software too.
Good luck

FelixCat

#74

just, love it

#75

I had just seen the videos (Treemare and Vector Paint)… amazing!!
Looks very promising, i´m not sure how fits in production but i can see very usefull probabilities. Can´t wait for the Mac demo!!

Great work, Taron

FelixCat

#76

Simply incrediable, I got chills down my spine.
I showed this to a few people and it just looks too real to be true. Its going to be my new wallpaper for a while now :slight_smile: . The model is great, 6mill polys wow, my little laptop would die at that level.

As for the amazing ZbornToy plugin, well you are ahead of your time Taron, Cheers for giving it to the people that deserve it!!! The price is more than fair.

Hey Taron you wouldnt have been involved in that amazing taron_people movie I saw in the messiah home page would ya???

ZbornToy plugin deserves a big space in the http://www.zbrush.info site!!!

#77

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#78

Yes, People.mov is my clip. Funny enough I made it for pixologic as a little showcase. But it incidentally showcased messiah just as much. So eventually we decided to post it to. I also just uploaded it to youtube. Aside from that, Australia’s public television had asked to air it, but I guess I kind of chased them away by revealing my unpredictable availability in case it needed adjustments of format!

Anyway, mac version is brewing right now! ETA is any day now!:sunglasses:

As for Fabrizios render, which this thread is about after all! Man, I should put his render with the eye up! Philipp put it in his lenscare gallery, so at least we have the set secured, hahahaha! Delightful stuff those renders! Memorable images, too!

Taron

#79

Taron, what about a version which fit’s into the FX-Tree of XSI? THAT would be a screamer! ZBornToy Node… I’d take two!
Lemo

#80

AUSTRALIAN TV!?!? If you ever get ZBorntoy to show on there, you MUST let me know when it airs!!!