wire parameters

[Koper]

yello, don't you just hate it when you get an idea just before you call it a night.

 

thought I'd ask a quick question here and see what happens

 

does anyone here knows of any good tutorials or documentation for parameter wire-ing, I wanna see if i can create a daylight system (using a vray sun) that controls the exposure controls of a vray cam, it is gonna be some programing but just wondered if there are some tuts that anyone might know about as to how the wire-ing is actually delt with (i.e. the lingo).

 

cool thanx

[Nils Norgren]

I don't know of any tutorials but I use wiring often in animation, it is very intuitive in my opinion, there is no programming involved, (scripted controllers are more in the programming realm). I think the help is fairly self explanatory. Look up Wire parameters in the normal help, (not maxscript help).

 

As long as the data type is the same, things work right out of the box, it sounds like you are going to make a one way connection, which is the most basic. You might need to muck around to get a multiplier, if one value needs to be opposite you can put a negative sign in front of the name of the value in the box. You can multiply, add, divide, subtract the value, to get the value to be in the range of what you need, I think you can do some trig in the box also.

 

For more complicated connections you would need a scripted controller, which would let you get some environmental information (frames, ticks, etc) as well as coerce different types of data, i.e. if you had a color, a number for a multiplier you could do some math to get it.

 

There is some great scripted controller tutorials on some of Bobo's tutorial materials for maxscript.

 

If wire parameters works for what you need I bet you will have it working in 5 min.

 

Good luck

 

-Nils

[Koper]

Thanx Nils

 

I am looking for the 'Bobo's tutorial materials' as you mentioned but don't really seem to get it, only the FAQ site of his, you think you can point me in the right direction

 

I wanna see if i can automatically control the white balance of the vray physical cam by the color temerature of the vray sky

 

cool thanx man

[Nils Norgren]

Here are some that I found, I don't know which ones deal with scripted controllers off the top of my head but they are all good resources,

 

http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?t=106481

 

http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/

 

http://www.cg-academy.net/dvds_menu_3dsmax.php

 

http://estore.autodesk.com/dr/sat1/ec_Main.Entry17C?SID=19515&SP=10023&CID=0&PID=810557&PN=1&V1=810557&CUR=840&DSP=&PGRP=0&ABCODE=&CACHE_ID=0

 

http://www.amazon.com/MAXScript-Essentials-Second-Autodesk-Maxscript/dp/0240809327/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9606775-9057766?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178624816&sr=8-1

 

For what you want to do I think you will need a scripted controller (called a Point 3 script in this case), in the white balance of your vray camera, You then need to make 3 variables inside the controller, one linked to the Turbity, one to the Ozone and one to the Sun's position (Which will need to be calulated in relation to the camera), these three items control the color of the sun/sky system as I understand it. You will need to figure out what the relationship between the 3 values is when it comes to the overall color of your scene, IE a high turbidity with a low ozone and a sun that is low in the sky will yield a very orange/yellow scene, to get the white balance color to match you would want the values to coerce something like [1, 0.85, 0.51] (Maxscript deals with color as 0 to 1 for each value of RGB).

 

I don't know if this will help but figuring out the relationship between the three values could be a battle, I would put a post on Chaos and see if Vlado could give you the reverse values that you could plug into the controller.

 

One question, is this necessary because you want to make a realistic simulation that has properties of smog, haze etc, but without the color of the environment, could things be animated to match and get close enough, or could they be manipulated in post to achieve the same end result?

 

I don't want to talk you out of a scripting challenge, (I get buried myself often) I was just wondering.

 

-Good Luck

 

-Nils

[Koper]

Thanx Amillion

 

We'll, as i said, just got a brain wave last night and there are basically two main reasons I want to try this

1. To create a setup scene where i only have to set the time of day and the camera''s settings don't need to be adjusted manually (like putting a digital SLR on automatic, ie, point and shoot)

 

2. Timelapse animation.

 

i am sure there must be much more usages for this, or maybe not, and that the controlers will get more and more, but i think it should be fun to do.

 

I wonder if i can use the ascii code for an rgb value (white = '#FFFFFF' ) (is it called the ascii code?)

will start to do some research tonight

 

cool man, we'll talk a bit later