Yes you can use outliner to do that - this will help you with sorting transparency, choosing which object will be post processed etc.
BTW I wrote that the next version was scheduled for yesterday. We changed plans.
We are adding full physics solution. Rigid bodies are now working fine - we are exercising our code right now to see if it's nicely balanced in terms of GUI and if it has some bugs left.
I'll of course bump the thread when releasing new version.
So we've released another version of pico - this time we've added physics - in addition of having physics in your realtime presentations you can bake them and use together with mental ray or any arbitrary renderer. Currently there are only rigid bodies but we'll add ropes, soft bodies and constraint in time.
Cheers!
bonzaj
here's a download link - so you won't need to revert to old pages:
Would it be possible for you to publish an example file? With some default effects applied, for the artist to deconstruct, and a step by step info text on how to get there. Or maybe be just some simple screenshots with explainations.
I managed to install a version of Pico but from there on I don't know really where to go. (found the pico materials and lights but didn't get anything to render)
Yeah I found these - However I know I would really prefer a traditional text+image format as opposed to clickthrough videos. Also, it would be great to see a screenshot of a typical game character 'rendered' in realtime pico, to give an idea of what can be achieved.
This is a great example, and showcases nicely how your plugin could benefit to character artists for added presentation value. Antialiasing, DOF, CAST SHADOWS(!), I want them all!
It would be great if you could have a sample file available for download to let artists deconstruct it. For instance I still have no idea how Pico needs to be setup to read a diffuse+normals+spec+shaders material applied to a model?
Can't wait try this. I hope there is no weird Maya wiring to go through to get a model looking like this one example above?
great example, thanks Bonzaj. I found how to make the shadowing to work, it seems that in a very far distance the shadows doesnt work so well. Any plans to do the same shadowing on a directional lighting? Any plans for HDRi?
Ok, so the next tuorial is online - it covers normal mapping. I'll post the used head tomorrow for additional teasing .
Quick answers:
Pior: I'm making an examples pack. I'll just need to test them if they will work from any directory. It will be some basic lighting/texturing/some physics. The example package will be a seperate download.
bugo: as for the shadow problems - I also noticed that it gets buggy with distance - try to tweak the "shadow scale" attribute - it mostly helps. Shadow map for directional lights SHOULD be straight forward . We have it scheduled.
As for the controllers - I suggest to skip them right now - they're handling the WinAPI keyboard messages. That means it will be completely laggy and with no use. We are working on direct input implementation - after we'll finish it - it should work fine.
HDRI - it's already working - you can load HDR images either in .hdr or .exr format!.
The framebuffer is FLOAT16 by default so you'll benefit from HDR when making DOF or blur effects. The only limitation is that .hdr cubemaps are only handled in vertical cross format. I know that we'll need to change it sooner or later.
We've recently released an HDRI cube map used for one of our productions called "Into The Pink". It was released under Creative Commons license so basically you can use it in your projects. ReadMe.txt file describes it more precisely. The cube map works perfectly with pico:
cone step mapping sounded interesting.
never heard of it so I googled. seems like a couple threads mention patenting issues and commercial usage concerns?
i've been messing around a bit with this, and think its got a lot of potential!
one thing the standard shader could do with is more control over the rim lighting/fresnel.
at the moment theres a lot of presets but no way to directly edit them (ramps, sliders etc)
also some more documentation (as opposed to video tutorials) would be really useful
can't wait to see whats in store as this develops!
*EDIT*
i've had more time to look at it, here's a few more notes
- a reflection blur slider would be nice
- i couldnt get anything other than .hdr cross images to work in the reflection texture slot
- i thought i might be able to plug a ramp texure into the ambient colour texture to set up a fake rim light effect. I didnt have much luck - is there a way to do this?
- i couldnt seem to make soft shadows although it's mentioned in the faq. Is this in the current release?
A lot of feedback . I'll need to gather all requests in one place because I'm starting to forget about different things. We are making a HDRI tutorial - there was one thing missing! A feature that allows you to change the exposure and gamma of your HDRI images. I see that there's a lot of people asking about shadows for directional lights again - we are on it, please be patient.
Soft shadows only work with picoUberLight. This will be fixed when directional lights will cast shadows too.
As for the 3dmax version - I guess it's impossible because pico is too deeply hooked into Maya.
Pixelherder:
- yes the fresnel coeff is currently hard coded and shown in presets. Could you link me a tutorial to rim lighting where fresnel with ramp is used. If I'll know more precisely how it is used then I'll be able to do it.
- bluring cubemaps is quite hard but not impossible. Actually it's quite interesting topic I'll notice that for the future.
Claydough: I wouldn't worry about that conestep map patent. The patent was only for applications that were visualising landscapes for advanced flight simulators. Moreover it uses some different preprocessing steps. It's still 5 years til it's gone but there are tons of papers that actually use this technique. In example relaxed conestepping which we are using and which is described in GPU Gems 3.
Oh by the way!!
What would be the minimum Nvidia card to support all the Pico features? For instance my card at home cannot do some of the Mudbox2 screen filters hence I am thinking of upgrading. I guess I might aswell go for something running Pico's (and JiStyles', and Brice's) shaders properly.
pior: The minimum is GF6, but some shaders may be to "fat" for this card. In example if you would like to use depth of field with a really big sample kernel then GF8 would be the best choice.
hi i have a few more ideas for features, none of them are essential right now though but i thought they were worth a mention
- it would be nice to attatch glows/lens flare effects to lights (i know! they can be cheesy, but its still something that would be nice to have)
- post processing effects are a bit convoluted. if there was any way of not having to use terms like "$scr0$+result" and using a GUI of some sort, it'd make things a little more comfortable for novice users (like me!)
- it would be nice to attatch glows/lens flare effects to lights (i know! they can be cheesy, but its still something that would be nice to have)
You can try playing with volumetric light that is a post processing effect.
There is no tutorial on it yet - but as I remember it's pretty intuitive and does not require heavy tweaking.
- post processing effects are a bit convoluted. if there was any way of not having to use terms like "$+result" and using a GUI of some sort, it'd make things a little more comfortable for novice users (like me!)
[/quote]
good point, we'll do it in next release - any suggestions for types of convolution?
In this release we have cleaned our HDRI support. Right now we support almost all known HDRI formats - horizontal and vertical crosses, angular maps, latitude-longitude and DDS cube maps. Also because of numerous requests we have finally finished soft shadow maps for directional lights.
Lastly we have also released an HDRI tutorial for handling various attributes of cubemaps in pico.
Heres a ChangeLog fragment for this version:
- fixed a bug when converting transparent objects.
- directional light now can cast shadows.
- blurriness attribute added to cubeMap node.
- exposure and gamma attributes were added to texture for better
control of lightmaps and HDRI maps.
- cube maps are now handled by one type of node - picoCubeMapFile
the supported formats are: vertical cross, horizontal cross,
angular map, longitude-latitude.
You can download pico from downloads section and see a tutorial in tutorials section.
is the dynamic shadows coming form direction lights any thing like the assassins creed / prince of persia / cod4 shadows ? those are mad cool highres flicker free and awesome all around ...
i would find out myself but in the new pico version the pico preview window remains black for me no matter what i do
warby: yes - directional light shadows produce a lot less artefacts than from spots but you still need to tweak them. I think what you were trying to ask for are cascade shadow maps. They dynamically change resolution based on the distance. These are not supported yet (I guess they are not needed now). Except that they're more flicker free than those produced by uberlight.
yes exactly finally i know the name YOU ARE THE BEST would be nice for the future but i find it more important that you nail the fundamental work flow a bit better i am still begging for maya cam controls in the pico preview window and that it would at least with some sort of ERROR shader display all the geometry that doesn't have a pico shader.
.... but really for now id be happy if it wasn't just black
After four years (pico actually is four year old). I finally did it. I hooked into maya window and now except for controlling the camera in pico preview you can do a FULL EDIT . There a small problem though - currently manipulators are not displayed . But this is just a matter of time. I'm fixing an ATI bug right now and we'll make an update in the evening.
Ok new version uploaded - it fixes a black screen on ATI and of course adds a possibility to edit camera and everything in pico window. NOTICE - disable vsync in your drivers (set to force off) for smooth feedback in pico.
Tried this out last night, and I LOVE it, probably only scratched the surface but I'm sure I will practise with it a lot more. BTW, when I try to add volumetric light I get an error.
elementrix: thanks for the info. We'veforgot to include one file in installer .
I guess volumetric lights will need a separate tutorial. They're not so obvious actually .
Anyway I'll add this file in a next quick fix release (today or tomorrow).
We are still there and we bring you the newest release of pico.
First of all we've added a support for CgFX shaders. We have tested all cgfx shaders that come with maya. So Basically from now on you'll be able to write your own stuff.
Next thing is the direct input support for keyboard and mouse.
The tutorial for CgFX is now online, tutorials for controllers will be ready for tomorrow.
Hello everyone
I was very excited at first about this plugin, and I think it's a brilliant idea. I haven't yet checked everything into details, but so far the interface seemed rather concise and handy, so congrats
However, I was wondering about the overall performance of the engine. On a pc (quad core 2.4, gerforce 9800gtx+ 512Mo, using the latest drivers, 182.50) I get unbelievably slow performance (around maybe 3-6 fps), under both 32 and 64bits maya2008. I'm talking here about a simple test scene: one plane one box, with native shader and a point light.
The standalone download links are down, so I can't figure out if that's a global problem with the engine. Maya and 3d aps in general run pretty fast usually, so i guess a more generic technical issue would show up for those as well. Any idea?
Brice: I know that problem. The current walkaround is to disable your vsync in display drivers. You need to set it to "force off". If you have a display adapter with a fixed refresh rate (ie 60 hz). Then maya window thread will grab 95% of frames from those 60 leaving just couple to pico. When you disable the vsync you'll see an immediate difference.
We are working on pico 3.5 with a massive amount of physics effects. It will be released in about 2 months.
Hi there, thanks for that fast answer
unfortunately it doesn't seem to affect the problem. I tried deactivating vsync for maya, and then for all applications. It doesn't make any difference while changes work for AA settings in maya for ex.
Oddly the bug only appear when moving the camera around manually using 'alt'. If I keyframe the camera then everything renders fine at interactive rates.
Hi there, thanks for that fast answer
unfortunately it doesn't seem to affect the problem. I tried deactivating vsync for maya, and then for all applications. It doesn't make any difference while changes work for AA settings in maya for ex.
Oddly the bug only appear when moving the camera around manually using 'alt'. If I keyframe the camera then everything renders fine at interactive rates.
Hi bonzaj, maya crashes when you make a new native pico material, and then do an 'undo' operation. Any idea what causes this? Really love the app by the way looking forward to getting SSAO support as well
btw i also get a substantial framedrop when rotating the cam with my 8800gts/maya2009/vista32
had to un-install pico as it has made maya pretty unstable, files not even using it crash maya on loading, when merged they have meshes missing, got rid of pico and they are back...
Replies
Yes you can use outliner to do that - this will help you with sorting transparency, choosing which object will be post processed etc.
BTW I wrote that the next version was scheduled for yesterday. We changed plans.
We are adding full physics solution. Rigid bodies are now working fine - we are exercising our code right now to see if it's nicely balanced in terms of GUI and if it has some bugs left.
I'll of course bump the thread when releasing new version.
Cheers
So we've released another version of pico - this time we've added physics - in addition of having physics in your realtime presentations you can bake them and use together with mental ray or any arbitrary renderer. Currently there are only rigid bodies but we'll add ropes, soft bodies and constraint in time.
Cheers!
bonzaj
here's a download link - so you won't need to revert to old pages:
pico
Would it be possible for you to publish an example file? With some default effects applied, for the artist to deconstruct, and a step by step info text on how to get there. Or maybe be just some simple screenshots with explainations.
I managed to install a version of Pico but from there on I don't know really where to go. (found the pico materials and lights but didn't get anything to render)
Thanks!
Here you'll find tutorials which will describe you how to start. Right now
we have some time to prepare the missing tutorials and example files.
Yeah I found these - However I know I would really prefer a traditional text+image format as opposed to clickthrough videos. Also, it would be great to see a screenshot of a typical game character 'rendered' in realtime pico, to give an idea of what can be achieved.
Somehow like what Brice did
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=49920
At the moment the lack of visual information made the purpose of pico a bit unclear to me. I'm sure you guys will sort it out soon tho!
Ok got it. I asked my friend from the group witja to publish some WIP stages of his model rendered in pico. And he accepted - thanks.
Here are two shots - tomorrow I'll send another one with model of face.
There is no baked lighting - just pico standard lights.
This is a great example, and showcases nicely how your plugin could benefit to character artists for added presentation value. Antialiasing, DOF, CAST SHADOWS(!), I want them all!
It would be great if you could have a sample file available for download to let artists deconstruct it. For instance I still have no idea how Pico needs to be setup to read a diffuse+normals+spec+shaders material applied to a model?
Can't wait try this. I hope there is no weird Maya wiring to go through to get a model looking like this one example above?
Thanks for the quick replies, really nice of you.
Thanks a lot, this is rocking more and more.
Ok, so the next tuorial is online - it covers normal mapping. I'll post the used head tomorrow for additional teasing
Quick answers:
Pior: I'm making an examples pack. I'll just need to test them if they will work from any directory. It will be some basic lighting/texturing/some physics. The example package will be a seperate download.
bugo: as for the shadow problems - I also noticed that it gets buggy with distance - try to tweak the "shadow scale" attribute - it mostly helps. Shadow map for directional lights SHOULD be straight forward
As for the controllers - I suggest to skip them right now - they're handling the WinAPI keyboard messages. That means it will be completely laggy and with no use. We are working on direct input implementation - after we'll finish it - it should work fine.
HDRI - it's already working
The framebuffer is FLOAT16 by default so you'll benefit from HDR when making DOF or blur effects. The only limitation is that .hdr cubemaps are only handled in vertical cross format. I know that we'll need to change it sooner or later.
Cheers and thanks for great feedback!
bonzaj
http://plastic-demo.nazwa.pl/wordpress/?cat=11
We've recently released an HDRI cube map used for one of our productions called "Into The Pink". It was released under Creative Commons license so basically you can use it in your projects. ReadMe.txt file describes it more precisely. The cube map works perfectly with pico:
http://plastic-demo.nazwa.pl/webpage/downloadables/HDRcubeMap.zip
cone step mapping sounded interesting.
never heard of it so I googled. seems like a couple threads mention patenting issues and commercial usage concerns?
http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=42706&start=0
iz this still the caSE?
I dont have anything NOT commercial here right now.
Exciting!!
one thing the standard shader could do with is more control over the rim lighting/fresnel.
at the moment theres a lot of presets but no way to directly edit them (ramps, sliders etc)
also some more documentation (as opposed to video tutorials) would be really useful
can't wait to see whats in store as this develops!
*EDIT*
i've had more time to look at it, here's a few more notes
- a reflection blur slider would be nice
- i couldnt get anything other than .hdr cross images to work in the reflection texture slot
- i thought i might be able to plug a ramp texure into the ambient colour texture to set up a fake rim light effect. I didnt have much luck - is there a way to do this?
- i couldnt seem to make soft shadows although it's mentioned in the faq. Is this in the current release?
A lot of feedback
Soft shadows only work with picoUberLight. This will be fixed when directional lights will cast shadows too.
As for the 3dmax version - I guess it's impossible because pico is too deeply hooked into Maya.
Pixelherder:
- yes the fresnel coeff is currently hard coded and shown in presets. Could you link me a tutorial to rim lighting where fresnel with ramp is used. If I'll know more precisely how it is used then I'll be able to do it.
- bluring cubemaps is quite hard but not impossible. Actually it's quite interesting topic I'll notice that for the future.
Claydough: I wouldn't worry about that conestep map patent. The patent was only for applications that were visualising landscapes for advanced flight simulators. Moreover it uses some different preprocessing steps. It's still 5 years til it's gone but there are tons of papers that actually use this technique. In example relaxed conestepping which we are using and which is described in GPU Gems 3.
Cheers!
bonzaj
What would be the minimum Nvidia card to support all the Pico features? For instance my card at home cannot do some of the Mudbox2 screen filters hence I am thinking of upgrading. I guess I might aswell go for something running Pico's (and JiStyles', and Brice's) shaders properly.
Suggestions welcome!
Cheers!
bonzaj
- it would be nice to attatch glows/lens flare effects to lights (i know! they can be cheesy, but its still something that would be nice to have)
- post processing effects are a bit convoluted. if there was any way of not having to use terms like "$scr0$+result" and using a GUI of some sort, it'd make things a little more comfortable for novice users (like me!)
You can try playing with volumetric light that is a post processing effect.
There is no tutorial on it yet - but as I remember it's pretty intuitive and does not require heavy tweaking.
[/quote]
good point, we'll do it in next release - any suggestions for types of convolution?
Cheers!
bonzaj
A new version has been released.
In this release we have cleaned our HDRI support. Right now we support almost all known HDRI formats - horizontal and vertical crosses, angular maps, latitude-longitude and DDS cube maps. Also because of numerous requests we have finally finished soft shadow maps for directional lights.
Lastly we have also released an HDRI tutorial for handling various attributes of cubemaps in pico.
Heres a ChangeLog fragment for this version:
- fixed a bug when converting transparent objects.
- directional light now can cast shadows.
- blurriness attribute added to cubeMap node.
- exposure and gamma attributes were added to texture for better
control of lightmaps and HDRI maps.
- cube maps are now handled by one type of node - picoCubeMapFile
the supported formats are: vertical cross, horizontal cross,
angular map, longitude-latitude.
You can download pico from downloads section and see a tutorial in tutorials section.
i would find out myself but in the new pico version the pico preview window remains black for me no matter what i do
.... but really for now id be happy if it wasn't just black
After four years (pico actually is four year old). I finally did it. I hooked into maya window and now except for controlling the camera in pico preview you can do a FULL EDIT
Cheers!
Cheers!
This is what I got on screen:
I guess volumetric lights will need a separate tutorial. They're not so obvious actually
Anyway I'll add this file in a next quick fix release (today or tomorrow).
Cheers!
We are still there and we bring you the newest release of pico.
First of all we've added a support for CgFX shaders. We have tested all cgfx shaders that come with maya. So Basically from now on you'll be able to write your own stuff.
Next thing is the direct input support for keyboard and mouse.
The tutorial for CgFX is now online, tutorials for controllers will be ready for tomorrow.
In case you forgot the links:
pico page
I was very excited at first about this plugin, and I think it's a brilliant idea. I haven't yet checked everything into details, but so far the interface seemed rather concise and handy, so congrats
However, I was wondering about the overall performance of the engine. On a pc (quad core 2.4, gerforce 9800gtx+ 512Mo, using the latest drivers, 182.50) I get unbelievably slow performance (around maybe 3-6 fps), under both 32 and 64bits maya2008. I'm talking here about a simple test scene: one plane one box, with native shader and a point light.
The standalone download links are down, so I can't figure out if that's a global problem with the engine. Maya and 3d aps in general run pretty fast usually, so i guess a more generic technical issue would show up for those as well. Any idea?
thx
Brice: I know that problem. The current walkaround is to disable your vsync in display drivers. You need to set it to "force off". If you have a display adapter with a fixed refresh rate (ie 60 hz). Then maya window thread will grab 95% of frames from those 60 leaving just couple to pico. When you disable the vsync you'll see an immediate difference.
We are working on pico 3.5 with a massive amount of physics effects. It will be released in about 2 months.
Cheers!
bonzaj
unfortunately it doesn't seem to affect the problem. I tried deactivating vsync for maya, and then for all applications. It doesn't make any difference while changes work for AA settings in maya for ex.
Oddly the bug only appear when moving the camera around manually using 'alt'. If I keyframe the camera then everything renders fine at interactive rates.
looking forward to 3.5!
edit just found it doh, too excited cheers
im getting exactly the same issue
Ok I see that this issue is a bigger problem. Can you write me on what GPU's this bug occurs?
Cheers!
btw i also get a substantial framedrop when rotating the cam with my 8800gts/maya2009/vista32