Is there any way to access the old forum prior to Discourse?
Hi Dale,
I watched Kyle’s Rhino6 webinar today and while he was doing a great job showing the rendered display mode enhancements I remembered an old (pre-Discourse) ground plane that would show and animated waterplane. I asked in the questions and Margaret and I tried to figure out just what that might be. It was in a Beta and lots of display pipe changes were coming and going but the effect was just great for real time presentation of my yacht work with clients. I searched back through Discourse to its beginnings and realised that it was well before the new forum. I bet Margaret can ask around the office and dig up that brief and obscure feature. I think it would fit right in with v6 display modes.
I think that’s the first request for the NNTP newsgroup in over three years. We kept the server up for a year, then turned it off and … nobody cared.
Absolutely. Learned most of what I know from that old dusty newsgroup. Good times.
I only care when I remember a post of discussion from long time ago that I want to reference… Would not actively search it for current solutions but there was some very valuable information stored there. Or just fun posts. Too bad it is no longer online.
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Kyle, surely you remember the nice animated waterplane that someone at McNeel cooked up back in 2012 or so. It only lasted in Beta for maybe three weeks until the display pipeline dictated that it be dropped in order to move on with the overall goals at the time. I sure would love to see if that world work in V6.
The webinar was great today, really opened up my jaded eyes and I sent straight to a model I was working on and did some of your tips and am pretty stoked by images such as these.
I have to admit that I like the real time display now more that the full rendered version above.
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Yep- Jeff LaSor had a whole pile of awesome display stuff working for a bit. And he’s playing a huge part in the new stuff as well.
Thanks for the kind words about the demo- I like doing them, and it’s always fun to see people open new parts of the program and run with them. Great images, may you continue to create all the awesome things!
I vaguely remember the demo episode. I think Joseph’s ultimate question is not so much about the old newsgroup, but about the animated ground plane and whether the V6 display is capable of that sort of thing. Kyle lays it all with Jeff. @jeff ?
Yes, during V5 WIP there were some special effects that got put in as proof of concepts…but I believe that certain time constraints and things like UI cutoff prevented many of them from making it into the final product. The ground plane shader was one of them. Unfortunately due to the same reasons I’m not sure if I can get it into 6.x source tree…so perhaps it’s better suited for 7.0. I’ll look into it today and see what’s involved… The 6.0 architecture will definitely allow for things like this moving forward so I’m not too concerned about if or how it can be done, only when it can be done.
-Jeff
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Hi Jeff, Margaret said yesterday during the webinar that she though you might have been the wizard behind my dancing waters memory. Pretty early in the V5 beta as I recall. Sure looked good with one of my boats on it. I used a second fake ground plane with rippled sand or a reef texture below the built in animated water one and it looked great. Was that using a gif image? Can that be done now in v6?
Thanks for chiming in, I thought I had perhaps dreamed the whole scheme up and when I couldn’t find it on the forum I started asking about the old group.
No gifs… It was a shader that actually computed a wavy/rippled effect in real-time…combine that with transparency, reflection, and refraction using the other surrounding environment settings yields a “water” effect. Then animate it by constantly updating the frame, passing “time” to the shader, which is what changes the wave movement/motion.
-J
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Thanks for the explanation Jeff. Way above my paygrade though! So if that trickery worked at one point in the V5Beta, then would it be possible to implement back into V5 at its current level? Maybe I’ll just wait for something similar to show up in V7 Beta since I had nearly forgotten it anyway. It was when Kyle started switching environments in his webinar yesterday that I remembered the awe that I got when I originally found the waterplane switch on the early v5 Beta. I was sad to see that go.
Still things are looking great in the v6 display circus ring, keep up the great work.
You too Kyle!
An ground plane of animated water would be just terrific. I have created simple animations of my designs in the water using Flamingo Nxt and for a still view, the water can be tweaked to look pretty nice. But for an animation, the water remains still as the helicopter with camera flies around the boat; totally unrealistic
This animation has been made by animating displacement in Bongo plugin. I believe that the same animation is possible by animating displacement in the Snapshots command. (Snapshots command was introduced in Rhino 6.)
I’ve got an archived copy of the rhino/opennurbs/r.plug-ins newsgroups (~2003-2013) in Thunderbird format (including most attachments) along side a portable version of Thunderbird. Some messages are garbled, many are obsolete, but there are tons of gems. It’s huge though (~6.5GB). Message me if your interested and I’ll push a copy to the cloud.
hi mgi - is that the “developers” NG archive ?
I remember there was “regular NG” and “developers”, don’t recall “plugins” one - wondering if that’s the same thing?
-j