Seamless

I still don't think there is really anything to add back as far as exporting goes as the old way of having your avatar inside a proto (inside the smls file) can still be done by the artist but I don't think many are going to want to mess with this extra complexity. If you want to attract peole to make their own avatars you have got to keep things simple for them.
To me it sounds like a better design not to have your gesture keywords hard wired in your avatar in favour of having user definable keywords independent of the avatar but since I have made seamless chat use keywords from the avatar file to keep everything simple for the time being (the anim bar DEF names define the keywords), I feel sympathetic to your request and so I have considered as a favour to you, make it so seamless exports the anim bar DEF names to an exposedField MFString field called gestureNames when a GestureGroup exists in the smls file (so will be like a blaxxun avatar studio file). Where an under-bar is used in the DEF name for the anim bar, it will be exported as a space character in the gestureNames field (so you can do “good bye”). I am not sure why anyone would still want to import an avatar studio avatar as it would be easier to make an avatar using a seamless pre-stitched nurbs template to generate the mesh instead of modifying a mesh directly but if you like I can also make it so when seamless imports an avatar studio avatar, it uses the names from the gestureNames field for the anim bar DEF names, replacing any spaces with underbars. If this sounds good to you I will add this for the next version of seamless.

PS sorry I dont know anything about avatar studio’s .ASTmpl file but if its just a file with a set of output options how would this make it easier than having the options in the smls file?. What sort of options do you have in mind?

Hi Thyme,

Thanks, I appreciate both modifs for the next seamless version and I'm honored with them

About the export file we can drop it for now (since you are not aware about it). It permits not only to redefine a set of options but to rewrite parts of the exported wrl file and, in the limit, the entire wrl exported. If you want to give it a look, if interested:
http://www.odisseia.univ-ab.pt/ABNet2/tools/avstudio/exportfile/avatar.ASTmpl.zip

vcard

I can just add a joke about all that :

it is sure that I will go to Portugal to meet Vitor,
and / or he will come at my home
( I told him and he told me )
and as, Thyme , you know my old idea to come to visit you in Australia,
and / or teleport you in France,
now my new idea is to set up a meeting for us in some cyber real place !
Lisboa ? Paris ? Australia ? Dompierre-sur-Veyle ?

Think about , I am serious , life is short


oupsss pardon , just one of my crisis ...

Next stop

Sorry to disappoint but I am an introvert and so I do not like public events in the real world, they cause me too much stress.
I would be happy to chat in seamless chat however with anyone who wants to chat with me there, it's a lonely place most of the time.
I would like to adventure from my home some day and see Europe (I grew up in Wales Britain for the first 10 years of my life so I have a sense of home being there) but not right now, not until seamless is a success lol, I see no reason why seamless wont become a killer app after the new features I am working on have been added

Hi Alain Jicer vcard and all I have been experimenting a bit this year with different ways to make hair.
This is what I have come up with today using 516 strands .7 mm in diameter:



Good angle for showing the strands are not textured:

I dont find a 3d file on your forum.
not online ?

BTW you will be able to be hair dresser !!

Thanks for your reply Alain Sorry I don’t have a file online Alain and it would not work with the current version of seamless if I did because of the new hair feature (simular to 100s of bendy lathes) is currently in development.
Sadly this hair does not look so good when its rendered in real time which is another issue. Povray generally improves everything but because this hair is so fine the strands of hair are typically thinner than the size of a pixel and so there are big problems with pixilation. I have seen a NVIDIA youtube advertisement of hair finer than this rendered in real time (at least that's the impression I got from the video) that looked very good but until I know how they get around the pixilation problem (perhaps the video card can deal with sub-pixels), hair this fine is only going to be any good for movies that are ray traced. Even with povray I seem to be getting some kind of rendering problem with this hair but I like how it ends up looking never the less. Because of these problems I have questioned whether this hair is worth the trouble but its probably easier for the artist to make because it is actual hair (so your not trying to make something that is not hair look like hair) but does it look better than the plasticine looking hair (what I used for Lucy in the catwalk movie)? is the question. Ep seems to think this hair is better but I am not so sure myself. Whats your honest opinion Alain, does it look better or worse than my plasticine looking hair?

Lucy is excellent ,

http://www.seamless3d.com/img/forum/imgc3ce0ca66091332d06b291c9fee22251.jpg

and I do like the spaghettis too !!
http://www.seamless3d.com/img/forum/imgb6ea6b02db9c8af71f1d864e563704bb.jpg

As you have smooth characters I think these hair goes well with them.Very well.

About the last ones , I am not sure if you are speaking about that probs below ,
(see the image)
but I think so ,
and yes it is not good , and I saw that before on vrml with pavements made of many pieces.

Btw you could see that here too :

http://alaindumenieu.pagesperso-orange.fr/artvrml/270406.htm

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/alaindumenieu/artvrml/images/buren1.jpg

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/alaindumenieu/artvrml/images/buren2.jpg

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/alaindumenieu/artvrml/images/buren4.jpg


http://artnews.org/news.php?i=331&t=news


So...may be you could have the strands more in desorder , less compact,
I cant write better in english, sorry , but I guess you understand what I mean .

Yes I agree Alain, this problem happens where as you show in your picture when the hairs are close and aligned (in a row right next to each other) but having them all aligned helps to not need as many strands and keeping many of them aligned can make it look better than when they are a mess but it is good to pull a few of the strands out of line to make it look more natural (and it looks better and more artistic too) so I guess a compromise has to be found some where in between.

It would be nice if you only needed about 50 strands for the entire head as you don’t get any of these problems when the hair is this sparse and it can look good but also looks a bit thin especially when seen from above.
Here is an earlier picture of the spaghetti at an earlier stage.


This is not the first time I have experienced the hair looking nicer before I have completed it lol

may be stupid , but what happen if you do some "references", with some rotation for each,
references from a group of strands , as in your image above ?

ps :

do you remember that ? lol :

http://alaindumenieu.pagesperso-orange.fr/artvrml/270706.htm

question to alain:
i have seamless installed on my computer.
in seamless i can move the rooms to the right place to cover the white holes????
if yes, help.
if no maybe i should use Internet Space Builder and not vivaty!
thanks.

yes you can, samd , no prob

but if you have first to learn seamless3d,
you must be patient a bit.

Anyways I tested with ISB and that works too ,
but same way :
it has to be leanrt a bit first..
as all we do in life , LOL

see my seamless test

the seamless also destory the 7.wrl?????
because not textrues like in the spazz....
so seamless also not good?

you are still confused, samd, as I told you,
with 7.wrl , the original file ,
and
7forspazz.wrl , the one I made simplier..
to be used in any 3d modeller ,
as the good one , seamless3d..

To not be confused , you must read well the help I made ,
and , plzzz answer in the  right topic , pzzz :

https://closed.forumactif.com/t3018p15-alain-dont-know-enter-caching-file-of-bs-contact#79326

I dont want to bore Thyme ,
but I am very happy because I gave samd a cyber lesson in live with Facebook ,
and ..I am very happy





of course he has for the moment strange results , lol , but he will repair

Thanks very much Alain for helping teach Seamless    I am truly indebted to you  

to answer your question about using references for the hairs, you could do this like I show in this tutorial “Duplicating Objects Using References”
http://www.seamless3d.com/tut/ref_obj

but I prefer here to keep each strand of hair individually generated by nurbs so that each strand can be controlled individually.

Referencing can reduce file size significantly but I don't think it will make things render any faster.

I have been thinking more about those images you showed Alain where you get the same type effect I have been getting with my hair just by having multiple lines running in parallel. I wonder if each strand of hair was coloured slightly different if this would help.

Speaking of textures, the new version of seamless will let the artist paint inside the 3D window using a brush much like a typical 2d paint program but you will be able to paint 3d objects directly.

I don’t know if this tutorial will be of any help to samd:
http://www.seamless3d.com/tut/texture_mapping/

thyme wrote:

... the new version of seamless will let the artist paint inside the 3D window using a brush much like a typical 2d paint program but you will be able to paint 3d objects directly.

wow !! very interested !!!
all I tried, since ages ,  to get to do tat was
or not free,so I leaved it,
or

I was not able to use it ...

so I wait your new version , Thyme !!

Very curious to see that !!!

ps : about samd, he had to fix translations and rotations,
but it is ok now ..

Alain wrote:

do you remember that ? lol :

http://alaindumenieu.pagesperso-orange.fr/artvrml/270706.htm

Yes I remember Alain , this was all made before seamless used nurbs or bezier curves, it would be fun to try making braids and a horse again using stitched nurbs patches, should be a lot easier however one can never be sure until one has tried. The circular bend (CCBend) I used back then may have been advantages for making braids.

Revisiting my spaghetti hair, I increased the number of strands from 149 to 258 (each strand planted by hand), decreased the diameter to 1 mm and made it semi transparent. Thinner strands reduces the fullness but despite this I feel it looks better. I am very happy with how the transparency gives the hair a softer more hair like appearance

I am working on the next exhibition for MixED,
and I found that below yesterday ,
LOL it is for you , Thyme

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/422834_3082508954790_1625829812_2564347_1609497071_n.jpg

I can obsess about anything Alain especially when I am allowed to spend all my time focusing on a problem.

I added some more hand planted strands bringing them to 300 and then quadrupled them using my algorithm bringing the total number of strands to 1200.
Took Povray 2 hours and 41 minutes to render but would have been a little faster had I left Povray the main focus for the entire time.

That seems perfect , now , inst'it ?

I have several ancient pupils who are working as hair-dresse , I could ask them

hey , Thyme , other matter please :

what about your painting way in next seamless3d ? ready ??

After rendering this hair last night I felt very happy Alain that I had finally got a full head of hair that has a nice soft appearance. (I had done tests before with dense hair that looked horribly like the strands were made of wire). However when I look at the previous picture posted here I can see how you loose being able to see all the individual strands of hair when you have a full head of hair but I can understand this may be only due to myself looking at hair and analysing how it looks for too long lol but it would be nice to render a movie with far fewer strands just for the time it takes. It seems though the next generation of video cards will be able do all this and more in real time.
This advertisement from NVidia shows their latest video card ray-tracing water and glass reflections in real time (no time waiting for the computer to render the image):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um6rMjwSNdU

So seems the processing power is just around the corner to be able to ray trace my hair in a fraction of the time.


Just a few months ago before I started developing the new hair node, I made it so I could plot a pixel on a 3d textured object where ever I clicked (this was surprisingly easy to do) and then I made it so I could drag the mouse to plot a line of pixels. The next thing to do is make it so you can set a radius for the paintbrush and have the pixels fade out like a spray can feature which you will typically find in a 2d paint program. I have already done this for color per vertex painting (not online yet), so there should be nothing too challenging left for me to complete my texture painting feature. However I have taken on quite a few major challenges for the upcoming version that are not yet fully resolved so I must try hard to not take on any new ideas or I will be unable to complete it before the end of the year lol.
If you are eager to test any feature out before it is ready, please let me know and I will see what I can do to upload something that can be played with before all the new features have been fully resolved.

Take your time , Thyme , your TREE of reason must stay your master ,
not the guys on web ,like me , forums-addicts
Have the GeForce with you

Btw I found a very funny tool recently , I will show you , Ok ??

btw what shows the GForce video at the end is fantastic.

I wonder what my sons will watch when they will have my age , LOL