Saturday, September 29, 2007

Downed Servers.

Unfortunately the raid (So much for redundant) of our server at work has died. I can get no word on when it will be fixed. 1 week tops. Very sorry about this. I might put the files in some temp place for a week or so.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Update

The Plugin has been updated. So this is version 0.51. Don't forget you need java 1.5.
So what was done?
  1. Fixed a bug in the bake file saving code. Now you shouldn't get "stuck" as was happening before.
  2. Found and fixed 2 bugs in the simulation code. It now should be more accurate. Note that in the advanced options you can select a single pass simulation mode. It might be faster, it will certainly be less accurate and may need smaller time steps.
  3. Implemented a direct gradient finder for the ray tracer.
  4. Provided a good default for max gradient. This makes ray tracing much faster. You might get some rendering artifacts however. Just increase the max density adjustment under the views and previews panel. Thanks goes to Peter for implementing this suggestion so quickly.
  5. Fixed a another bug in the bake file saving where the y velocity component was getting placed on both the y and z axis. This would cause rebakes to be totally incorrect.
  6. The coordinate system is now world coordinates, not the physics plugin local coordinates. This will change the direction gravity acts. Default is the -z direction.
  7. Moving between frames with a lot of particles was very slow. This has been somewhat fixed and should be a lot faster now.
So because of these bugs you should update ASAP. Here are some results from the debug process when its all pear shaped.

Simulate

Render. Problem!

Now it works and only 12 mins to render.


Don't forget with these render times that I have a AMD X2 5000 and use java 1.6 (about 1.5x faster than 1.5). The simulation time was under 10 mins, but i don't remember exactly how long it was. Also the simulation code is single threaded at this time.

And almost forgot. The Plugin is in the same place. Here

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Good news everyone....

Think the Professor from Futurama when you read the title.

Yep. The beta 0.5 is out. However the documentation is even more sparse than I would like. Remember this really is a beta.

Basic HTML getting started

PDF of the same thing

Failed attempt at a Flash tut I used wink, unfortunately screen grabs when a menu is selected/pulled down does not work. So its not so good. But maybe it will help someone.

Image dump of the above flash. Warning, quite large.

And finally the link you are all waiting for:
The Plugin and it comes with the whole No warranty deal.

And finally I forgot one very important thing. Trying to ray trace transparent materials will be Really Really slow (Glacial speed). This will be fixed at a later time. Also in the mean time report bugs at the AoI source forge forums.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

No posts does not mean zero progress

Well something like that anyway. I have been working away at the plugin. First of all we have added everything for the 0.5 beta release. I just need to fix the last few bugs that bug me. Secondly I'm moving the plugin over to the AoI 2.5 format. So when will it be ready? Well soon.

Last weekend I just got sick of computers and took my family to Venice for the weekend. It was nice and much cheaper than i thought it would be. This weekend could be the weekend. Lets hope.