Hello everybody,
Okey so after about a year of inactivity with my maps I’ve finally decided to update them a little bit. Unfortunately there still wont be mental ray support. I’ve looked into MetaSL and such, but it would just be so much work to learn it and then smash my maps on it that I don’t have time nor motivation to do it. I’ll probably release my maps under Apache 2.0 license (i’m getting rid of all 3rd party code to do that) so you can convert the maps to MetaSL by yourself and sell them if you feel like it.
So things that I’m going to do on this update:
- Support for maxs composite map (done already).
- Sensible size system for tilemap (If people could tell how this should work in your opinion, I’d like to hear it).
- Supersampling, at least for wood so it doesn’t look so horrible. (mostly done too)
One of the downside of this update will be that its not compatible with old maps, I’ll change the plugin ids so you can have both versions installed.
If you have other small ideas and perhaps bug fix requests please post them here and I’ll see what I can do. I wont be writing new maps here, just trying to fix the old ones.
Very glad to hear you are picking up development on these great maps!
Thanks also goes to the people who have supported the development of the maps through donations and technical assistance.
My wishlist would be:
-) Real world coordinates support for all maps, especially Gradient.
Personally I’m a big fan of the Gradient map, because of the option to randomize color per object.
The Tiles map isn’t really my thing. I can tell you though what I would expect from a procedural tiles map for archviz:
-) Random tile width/offset per row.
-) Radom UVW offset per tile.
I reality there is hardly use for “Flesh Stretcher Bond” styles, or rounded corners, noise etc. in archviz, usually what’s needed is something like this floor texture:
I could need some procedural random tile layouts in pretty much every project. The same would apply to wood floor layouts, for example a procedural heringbone map with color variation and random uvw offset per tile would be really useful.
Procedural wood isn’t useful, because it doesn’t look like wood
A map to slice up and shuffle a wood bitmap texture would be a killer app.
I’m aware that you are not really motivated to continue development, but I’m just telling…
I don’t think donations work. I’d suggest selling them with shareit or something, if they are really outstanding and useful for actual situations. For me this is the case with the Gradient Map. Not so with the others, right now. I’d pay something about 50$ for a truly useful procedural map, I know many others, at least in archviz, who would do the same.
So summarized:
- Real world coordinates (doable, shouldn’t be hard)
- Random tile width, offset. This is quite a lot harder. If somebody can figure out some nice algorithm for me to figure out what is the width & height & center point of the tile in any X,Y coordinate I’d like to hear it. Its easy when there is no randomization, then its just modulo stuff, but how to avoid overlapping with randomization, and since the random widths are cumulative, how to find the center point?
- Random bitmap textures, well there is the MultiTexture. I’ve already discussed with Thomas Suurland about making the integration with BerconTile better, so you can use it to randomize bitmaps per tile. ( http://www.cg-source.com/multitexture.php )
About the donations etc. Well I’ve received a lot more than I initially thought I would. Again thanks to all donators. Making the maps commercial is just too much work. I’ve talked with Autodeks about selling them, but that too would require a lot more work from me. It is a lot easier to keep this just as my hobby.
Looking forward to the updates, but I am already pretty happy with how these tools work.
One tiny frustration I have run into is in the random rotation feature of the tiles map. Not sure if it is possible, but this feature could use some options for the mapping type other than ‘stretch.’ The feature is still incredibly useful, but sometimes I find that the fixed stretch type mapping limits the scope of the feature.
Thanks for the effort you have put and continue to put into this Mr. Ylilammi!
That would be great!
Hello;
First of all thank you for your efforts, I especially appreciate the random option for the gradient map.
I ran however into some issues:
-one being the size thing as written previously
-the other one is about distributed rendering, the tile map is not rendering properly on server machines.
-and finally I have an error code 14001 at max launch when I install your plugin on XP64 machines.
Best regards,
Cyrille
Hey cyrille32,
Are you talking about 3.0 or some older version?
I think 3.0 should have fixed the size issues. ( http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=59&t=889641 )
I’ll have to check the tile rendering incorrectly over DR, it certainly shouldn’t do that.
14001 error is probably the missing Visual Studio SP1 redistributable. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=766a6af7-ec73-40ff-b072-9112bab119c2