Hi Mike, I had a look here and it works with 9.3.1 as expected... Now, the question is... can your nodes actually access the plugin? Maybe you could check the plugin config file used by the nodes to see if it contains exrTrader, and check if the nodes can access the plugin as well.

Cheers,
Mike

Allright, that is extremely strange... is that using the latest release version of LW?

Cheers,
Mike

Does your scene have the master handler applied as well?
Does it work if you use another saver?

Cheers,
Mike

Which render controller are you using?

I'll be having a look at that later on today, and hopefully I can track it down. A problem with the dummy saver is weird, as it doesn't really do anything...

Cheers,
Mike

Hi Mike,

thanks for the detailed log. The master handler shouldn't fail... nonetheless... images ought to be written even if it fails (at it does is provide the settings for the EXR file - if it isn't present, the files are written using the defaults).

The only things that strikes me as being off is that you're writing to a directory that is outside of the content structure, but that should be no problem either, especially when using the normal OpenEXR saver (which doesn't do any file name manipluation at all).

I'll try to reproduce the issue here using a similar path set-up as yours.

Cheers,
Mike

Hi David,
I wish it was... exrTrader provides all the buffers that can be accessed using LWs SDK.
The NT authored plugins (i.e. the PSD and the Aura saver) have access to more buffers, but that information is not available to third parties (yes, I asked them)..

Having said that, I'm working on a way around it, but it will need quite a bit of coding before it can be released. This will be part of a free upgrade to existing users.

Cheers,
Mike

SpinQuad has published part one of a two part tutorial on working with render buffers in LightWave 3D.

Professional Production Pipeline Part 1 - Introduction to Working with Render Buffers.
by Timothy Albee.

It also covers working with exrTrader with is rated very favourably.

Thank you Timothy for the nice article and thank you Tim for publishing it.

Haha, you are pushing it, aren't you?

Bump connections store the perturbing vector within the RGB data, basically:
final shading normal = initial geometry normal + bump
So the RGB data will store values between -1 and 1 in each component, depending on the direction of the bump.

Merging bumps would thus require different code, and you could probably only do a blend, none of the other blending modes (you'd need to do that to the image before the perturbing vectors are extracted from it, which is before the 3D image node sees them).

But hey, at least allowing for simple bump merges sounds like a nice feature request!

Cheers,
Mike

We've just released an update to the db&w tools that fixes two issues. It is available now in our downloads section.

Changes:

Version 1.1b:

• fixes a bug that made the Material Blender unuseable for ... materials *sigh*
• fixes a bug that caused the 32bit version of the Notifier to crash on Vista x64

Version 1.1a:

• fixes a bug that only affects the Material Blender for OSX-CFM, the other plugins have not changed.

Cheers,
Mike

We're proud to announce the 7th free update of infiniMap.

Version 1.5 is a milestone release. Amongst the major additions is full support for tiled OpenEXR images, a OSX UB port as well as a new batch converter.

We're also releasing infiniMap Exr, a lower cost edition of infiniMap that only supports tiled OpenEXR images. If you need to use JPEG 2000 or ECW images as textures, infiniMap Pro will fill your needs.

Here is a list of the major changes in Version 1.5:

• Supports tiled OpenEXR images as native files
• infiniMap Exr is available on OSX as a Universal Binary
• Completely re-written converter:
  
  • Multi-threaded
  • Writes JPEG 2000/ECW images of raw image files up to 500MB in size
  • Writes unlimited size OpenEXR images
  • Batch conversion
  • "Convert-on-Load" allows the loading of any supported image file into infiniMap, converting to a native image format as needed
  • Uses LightWave 3D image i/o plugins natively to read images for the conversion
  • Low-memory footprint - the converter processes on a scanline basis
• Multi-Channel texturing node for layered OpenEXR images.
• Various performance and usability improvements.

This update is available now in our downloads section. We hope you will enjoy working with infiniMap V1.5

Cheers,
Dagmar & Mike

We've just released our second version of db&w Tools, a free set of plugins:

Version 1.1 includes:

---

Material Blender
This node allows you to split up materials into shading components, merge shaders into materials or blend different materials together.

On thing worth noting is the fact that the shading input always overrides the respective material, so if you connect a material to the "fg Material" input, the "fg Specular" will override the specular component of the material.

Kudos to Mike Stetson for coming up with the initial idea.

---

Simple Colour Corrector

A node that offers the same colour correction options as the image panel, including gamma correction.

---

Command Statistics
This Master plugin records all commands fired by Layout and sorts them by how many times they are accessed.
The idea is to record all actions, allowing you to decide which commands are used more often to streamline your configs and keyboard shorcuts. You can let it run while you work and after a few sessions it should become clear which parts of Layout you use more.
This plugin is a Layout Master, which means that it is launched with LightWave 3D.
The list of commands is stored between layout sessions.
You can export the list of commands to a text file (tab delimited) or clear it.

---

Growl OSX, UB only.
This master handler plugin sends notifications to Growl (http://growl.info/) on OSX.
Supported events are:

• Starting Frame Render
• Frame Rendered
• Starting Render
• Render Done
• Scene Loaded
• Scene Saved

You can use the Growl preferences to customize these.

---

Render Audio Notifier Windows only.
This master handler plugin allows you to assign sounds to specific events.
Supported events are:

• Starting Frame Render
• Frame Rendered
• Starting Render
• Render Done
• Scene Loaded
• Scene Saved

You can use "Control Panel/Sounds and Audio Devices" in Windows to assign sounds to these events.

---

The plugins are available now in our downloads section.

If you find any issues, don't hesitate to contact us.

We hope you enjoy working with the plugins.

Cheers
Your db&w team...

We've just released a maintenance update of exrTrader.

Changes:

• This release updates exrTrader with OpenEXR V1.6.1
• The default render mode for exrTrader now is "VIPER and save Buffers"
• exrTrader now supports image file names with 5 and 6 digits.
• Fixed an issue with path names on OSX

We hope you enjoy working with exrTrader.

If you have any issues, please feel free to mail us at info@db-w.com or use our support forum.

Best Regards,
Your db&w team.

Haha... yes, gratulations to you.

Actually, let me re-phrase that:

WELCOME TO THE MEGA PIXEL RENDERER CLUB!
Cheers
Mike

Yup, and I didn't create the sample yet... sorry. Bad Mike, bad boy (me, not you that is).

Cheers,
Mike

I'll post something tomorrow, when I have access to Fusion again.
You'll need Fusion 5.2 though - and it won't work for all elements that LW renders as not all of them produce a proper motion buffer (HVs being an example).

Cheers,
Mike