Sorry I’ve been a bit unresponsive lately. I’ve decided to stop supporting BerconMetaballs because it takes time and it is mainly finished so there aren’t any interesting new features to add. I don’t have vray license at hand atm so I really couldn’t even if I wanted to.
I licensed the whole stuff under Apache License 2.0 so you can do basically anything you want with the code. Edit it, share it, sell it, whatever. Included is also todo list of some minor things you can fix if you wish. The code is pretty clean and should be easy to maintain/update/etc.
The motion blur issue remains to be unsolved. I haven’t heard from the developers of pflow other than that they’d look into it at some point, perhaps its fixed in Max 2011. To my understanding the bug is in pflow and thus I can’t really fix it myself.
If you have any further questions regarding the plugin I will try to answer them here.
thanks a bunch. I love your wooden parliament image btw. It’s my desktop background. Can’t stop fantasizing about blowing it up with reactor or something.
One thing that would be REALLY awesome for BerconMetaBalls would be if it could use Vertex Color… Is it possible at all?
If yes, could it perhaps be one last addition to the plugin before you stop supporting it? I cannot tell you in words how happy I would be to see this functionality in BerconBalls…
DADAL, I think they are under Bercon, IIRC. Yeah I wrote the multitexture and floorgen.
Martin, like I said I don’t have vray license atm so… Another thing is that while its pretty straightforward process it would still take roughly 15-20 hours with all the testing etc. and I can’t afford to spend so much time on it right now.
I just discovered this plugin! Awesome! you just saved my life, I needed metaballs and blobmesh is too slow. Berconmetaballs is so fast! thank you so much.
I installed it along max 2011 and vray SP5. It works great so far. Except sometimes get an error message in V-Ray messages: "warning: Invalid geometric normal (-1.#IND -1.#IND -1#IND) for “<unknown>”. And it just freezes max and I have to kill it.
Is there anyway to use UV mapping? I’m using mesh objects for the metaballs right now…
Also any modifiers added on the metaballs does not seem to be affecting the metaballs. I think it would be a great addition for example to be able to add a relax modifier on top of the metaball shape.
Quick request for ya! Any chance of a recompile for vray 2? Also if that wasn’t pushy enough, I’m using thinking particles for a few things at the minute - it’d be brilliant to get motion blur support for it! At the minute what seems to happen is it blurs between the the origin and the position of the particle in a line - bit of an odd one. I’m doing loads of blood splats at the minute so it’d be invaluable!
One feature idea/request for this plugin was adding the iso surface for objects. Now that you’ve wrote the Distance Texture for VRay 2.0, pluging it into Metaballs should be fairly easy and you could render iso surfaces of objects, like the dimos vrayiso plugin does.
Vlado, if you can provide me with a nfr vray 2.0 license and sufficient sdk to use the same algorithm distance texture uses I could try to do it myself just for fun. It would probably be pretty nice feature to have.
Vlado you’re a star - much appreciated for that. I was going to do a test with vray 2.0 to see if it worked better with tp - I think I read that there’s better support for it in vray 2.0 overall, regardless of whether it works with the metaball plugin or not. The project I’m on is largely based on vray 1.5 sp5 at the minute due to the fact the company knows it’s rock solid and there isn’t a huge amount of complicated 3d for us to need any major improvements in what 1.5 already does - if I could use the meta stuff with tp then it’d be a good excuse to move up, after seeing some of the bitmap related speed ups in rendering though that might swing it too!
