Some more greek pots for the collection, once again modelled, textured and rendered in Lightwave 9.6
The bands around the centre were created with a weight map, render took approx 35 minutes to complete.
The Greek house is basically finished now, a few minor tweaks here and there, but its looking pretty good, I have also decided to coin the term Archaeolitecture, so as of the 23/06/2009 at 22:01 this is offically my word.
The tiles are all individual objects, the windows can be opened and the gates and doors etc can also be opened, moved. Im hoping tommorrow to get into the house and start adding some extra details and getting some nice renders.
Im also hoping to get this into vue or getting some vue things into lightwave, but not really sure how to do this. When I find out I think ill write a tutorial on it since there doesnt seem to be much documentation on this subject.
Any comments or suggestions about the model are more than welcomed.
Some more work has taken place on the Athenian house. The plaster texture has been altered slightly to make it a little warmer coloured, the wood has been changed, windows have been added and the stone texture has been lightened slightly.
The colour looks a little odd due to the colour of the roof overpowering the frame.
Still lots more work to be done.
I am in the process of creating a Athenian Town house from a Swedish book called “Den antika staden – Livet i det klassika Athen och Rom” or – the ancient town, live in classic Athens and Rome.
Today I am only posting a Work in Progress shot of what I have done so far.
The model is being created, textured and rendered in Lightwave 9.6. So far I have been very pleased with the workflow and in particular the Node editor of lightwave. Its very nice not to have to export models but rather have them constantly updating in Layout automatically. I am also impressed by how it does NOT crash constantly. Its a real joy to use.
There will be a lot more windows, another door in the courtyard, tiles on the roof and on the wall and some stairs. Later I will probably put it into a scene somehow and see where it goes from there.
Todays Model is of a gold pot from a Saxon grave. Gold is a material that is particularly hard to get right I have found after a very long period of trial and error. The current set up uses several noise nodes in order to get nice texture between the colours and a very low bump.
At this point your probably thinking to yourselves “those reflections look funny, I dont trust them at all.” It was this that led me to learn a very good lesson of the day.. Always make sure the background isnt plain black when using lightwave, or else it gives you nasty results, The corrected image is below.
The shading is controlled by a blinn shader and there is an gradient driven incidence node that creates the brown hue around the edges of the pot. Below is the completed node map for this material.
The model was created, textured and rendered in Lightwave 9.6
After pretty much a three working week wait I have received the following,
Posted by: John Canver
On: 2009/04/23 06:45:52Hi Richard,
The Save As proposed formats are a user interface glitch, only VOB vue file format can be used to save objects, that’s why PZ3, PZZ, or other formats than VOB are invalid. We’ll fix this in future updates, so only the VOB format be proposed, as expected.
Regarding export, what kind of object are you trying to export?
Have you tried raising exported maps resolution, to avoid missing details?
Have you tried switching the generic paramterizer option on and off to see if the result is better with or without it?Maybe you could attach a file that cannot be properly exported on your side, so we can test it here and see what goes wrong? If you’re ok with that, please put the object and all texture maps into a single zip file, and try to attach it here. If the zip file is too big to attach, give me the zip file size so I can create an upload area for you. Thanks.
Best regards.
John Canver
the answer to these questions is yes and yes, and I’m pretty sure I described what I’m trying to do in the original message, however, I have sent the following .zip file to John in the hope that I can prove that the exporter doesn’t work the way it should. (please note that I have removed the objects from this zip for public access)
Below are is an image that I have created of the toilet object and the flaws that they have.
Hopefully this will be the end of this.
Posted by: Richard Potter
On: 2009/04/23 12:47:21Dear John,
Thanks for your reply,
I have done some more tests for you and compiled the results in the following zip file which can be found on my site, (in order to save the setting up of a download area).
http://www.richard-potter.co.uk/images/broken.zip
It is 17mb, the readme file will explain about the images and what the processes I took where.
Thanks,
Rich Potter
Don’t get me wrong, I love vue, I just want it to work.
One of the main reasons I bought Vue 7 in December when it first came out, was to make use of the exporter module, a piece of software which allows you to export textured objects with bump and alpha maps. Ideally I was hoping to be able to sell and share some of the models I have been working on. Alas no, the functionality of this module is particularly questionable and it appears that I’m not the only person who is having issues with it either.
I have made a previous complaint to e-on regarding the exporter module to which I was told that it would be fixed in a future update, however 3 updates down the line there is still no sign of a fix.
Recently I decided to try and export to poser and then out as an .obj to see if this would work, knowing that vue was supposed to be able to do this. However, surprise surprise, it didn’t work, upon opening the file in poser the message “The file being read is not a valid Poser file” appears.
I am at a loss as to which area of the exporter module actually works! and at a further loss as to why they are STILL selling this essentially useless piece of software for 150 dollars!
I have asked for my money back, and fully expect to receive it.
Below is the transcript of the complaint I made and the reply I recieved, this has been going on for about 2 weeks now, im begginging to think that I may have been forgotton/ignored, so I shall be ringing them later.
Hello,
I am having issues with basically all exporting from vue, regardless of the model or level or complexity of texturing and quite frankly, am fed up.
PZZ and PZ3 exports are not readable by the latest build of poser 7 – the error message when trying to import them says “The file being read is not a valid Poser file” – This has also been noted by other people on the renderosity forums and is therefore entirely recreatable. (I have tried re-installing poser 7 to no effect)
Exporting Obj/3ds with materials has improved but still doesnt work well, the color map is more often than not a complete mess and thus useless. Trying to export with a bump map and or an alpha map simply doesnt work, everythign comes out skewed and black. I have tried with a number of different file types and image types, i.e. jpg, tiff, png, 3ds, .obj and on a number of different objects. This does work if I only want to export a primitive created in vue, but I and im sure the majority of users, want to do more than that.
So this leaves me with vob, which I cant send/sell to people who dont use vue. I can understand that this is a complex area of the program, but for a module that costs so much (150 dollars!) it really ought to work on some level.
I must express that there is no one particular scene that I can send you for you to replicate these issues as they can be easily be recreated on your end.
I really think this ought to be fixed quickly or I shall be expecting to be refunded the cost of the exporter module which basically doesnt work.
Thanks for a quick reply.
Rich Potter
Posted by: Richard Potter
On: 2009/04/06 05:08:06I have installed the latest patch and this still does not improve/solve this issue.
Posted by: Lee Randall
On: 2009/04/07 04:29:58Hi Richard,
I’m forwarding this to our development group.
Best regards.
Lee RandallPosted by: Richard Potter
On: 2009/04/17 05:41:10Hello,
Is there any news on this? Its been two weeks since I posted this and no updates or anything since it was passed onto the development team.
Since I am losing potential revenue by not being able to export from Vue and sell my models I feel it is appropriate that I am refunded for the Exporter Module, $149 Dollars, which does not work properly and is therefore not fit for its purpose.
Thank you,
Rich Potter
A summary of the phone call will appear after I call.