sprites software rendering, ideas?

[matt estela]

More reading and googling, to quote arrested development, 'I've made a huge mistake'. 

Seems only renderman for maya supports sprites with the full suite of per-particle tricks. Not maya's software renderer, not mentalray. We're up to essentially up to maya v16 now, and this still doesn't work? *sigh*

'Fine' says I, 'I'll try the hardware render renderer instead'. Works locally, fails on the farm because, of course, there's no ogl on those machines, and there's no software ogl fallback. Hardware render 2.0 renders black, which fills me with joy know that its planned to be the default viewport mode any day now.

There was a post by daniel roizman back in 2002 saying there was a script to convert sprites to instances, but I can't find it, and I fear that my setup of using rgbPP and spriteNumPP probably won't work anyway.

Hive mind, help? I'm gonna set off a local batch render and curse the maya gods once more...

-matt

[Sid]

Rendering sprites? Yeah, you're screwed. Aside from Renderman, I think I remember (from like, 2007) that 3Delight does a good job of translating per particle attrs, and also of generating pretty pictures with sprites. 

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[matt estela]

Rage fading.... fading....

Found this old post on the mentalray forum:

http://forum.nvidia-arc.com/showthread.php?4078-Rendering-particles

Luckily I only have 10 sprites, so wiring it wasn't too hard. Basically:

-add userScalar1PP

-particle expression,add  'userScalar1PP, = spriteNumPP/10' (ie, take the sprite num and bring it down to 0-1)

-make a file node for each frame in the sequence

-connect them all to a ramp, set interpolation to none

-make a particlesampler

-connect userScalar1PP to the vCoord of the ramp

-create a mult/divide node

-mult the ramp by particleSampler.rgbPP

-wire that to a shader

-do a similar dance for opacityPP

-dance

Works in mentalray and vray. Of course it doesn't work in the maya software renderer nor the viewport, but I don't need those anymore.

Thanks for making me waste a day on this maya!

[Sid]

Wow. 

Just.... Wow. 

[matt estela]

I know.

Since leaving london, jesus, 5 years ago now, I haven't done any fx or particle work. I figured in that time surely with nparticles, bifrost, soup, general competition, relatively simple stuff like this would have been sorted. No, no it hasn't.

Even sticking within vanilla maya its distressingly arcane. Using the particle 'wizard' to do random sprites vomits a 200 line expression into your particle setup. Really maya? REALLY?

I tell ya, I totally get why fx guys become houdini evangelists at the drop of a hat. This is enough to make me flat refuse to do fx work in maya, it shouldn't be this obtuse.

[Milos Vukotic]

Maybe I just don't understand the problem, but I don't understand what was exactly the problem with distributing sprites on particles and rendering them with mental ray.

Shouldn't 1-faced polygones with transparency and texture maps instanced on particles work just fine?

But again, I guess I didn't understand quite well what you were looking for exactly...

[matt estela]

If you use spriteNumPP to pick random sprites from an image sequence, it only works in the viewport and the hardware render buffer. All the offline renderers I had available (maya software, mentalray, vray) ignore the spriteNumPP setting, and make all the particles use only the first frame of the image sequence.

[Milos Vukotic]

Aha ok ok, sorry now I get it, you have few different sprites and want to distribute them randomly so spriteNumPP for some reason doesn't work...BUT WHY!? :D What does spriteNumPP have to do with rendering :S

How's that even possible :S I'll test it out as soon as I get home.

[Matt Johnson]

Hello!

Just came across this post and was hoping someone could help me out with setting up the shader mentioned above.  I followed the steps outlined, but it doesn't want to render.  Not sure what I'm doing wrong. 

Thanks in advance. 

M

[matt estela]

Sorry, I didn't save an example scene for future reference. There's slighty more expanded notes on my wiki, but that's all I got I'm afraid.

http://www.tokeru.com/mayawiki/index.php?title=Particles#Convert_spriteNumPP_so_it_can_be_software_rendered

[Matt Johnson]

Hey!  

Thanks for getting back to me.   I was finally able to get it working.  Seems nuts that we still have to rig something like this up in order to get sprites to software render.  Hopefully Autodesk and or VRay will implement a fix or something like this in the future. 

Best, 

M

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[matt estela]

Ah, good to hear.

*coughHoudiniCough*

;)

-matt