Is there a Greeble plug-in being worked on for Carrara? Or has something like it already been made?

What is Greeble?

greebles are all the doo-dads and watchamacallits on the outside of a thingamajig... usually a space thingamajig, but sometimes architectural doohickeys are greebled too... and don't confuse your thingamajig with a thingamabob... that'll get you into some trouble... :o) I haven't heard of one for Carrara... saw one for 3DS Max... would be useful if you do a lot of sci-fi scenes...

Nice explanation, FWT. I didn't realise I needed to know all that. :-) I should think that you could use Julien's Deeper plugin for this. You'd need to set up some greebles to convert into Normal maps but you could add a lot of doodahs to your thingamajig with no extra polys that way.

thingamajig, watchamacallits, doohickeys?! Urgh, i'm really cutted out, have a nice day -TOXE

That was actually my first thought for the new normal maps -- greeble.

Attached Link: http://www.schloerb.com/tutorial/greeblecity_1.htm

oh my,this is a real cool and useful plugin.

I can do this easily in vertex modeling room with grid plane and dynamic extrusion method. Good stuff is in Carrara :)

Message edited on: 11/07/2004 16:13

" And it's pretty easy to do using a terrain. You just import a greyscale image which has a few squares on it of different shades and then tile the resulting terrain." That's good to generate the initial buildings, but they seem to be missing the "greeble" effect. Ie., widgets and things on the "rooftops" etc. Greeble basically extrudes the polys, but also adds micro-elements to selected faces.

Attached Link: http://www.richardrosenman.com/greeble.htm

Message edited on: 11/07/2004 20:50

It appears to me that there is a great difference between the "geeble" created city and the "Carrara" created city. But perhaps I'm not looking at both subjectivly enough.

LOL. I can make micro-elements; man hole, drain in crubs, stop lights, and street lights. Once it is all made on a block and I can duplicate it before I may use dynamic extrusion. What else did I miss? please post it and I will see what I can do. InfoCentral yes you didn't look enough in Carrara.

"LOL. I can make micro-elements; man hole, drain in crubs, stop lights, and street lights. Once it is all made on a block and I can duplicate it before I may use dynamic extrusion." I'm sure you can, but the purpose of a greeble plugin is to do those micro-elements automatically for you, and give you the ability to change that result on the fly if you don't like it afterwards. Doing it by hand once, then duplicating that result multiple times isn't quite the same as not having to do it once by hand, and not having to duplicate it. ;-) I like the terrain meathod, it looks good... and you can always add the illusion of more complex geometry with maps and shaders, but... sometimes you need actual geometry (ie., for close camera panning and fly-bys in animation). I'm sure a Greeble plugin would be useful to the Carrara community, and relatively simple to make. You could also create a great greeble effect using low polys with displacement maps, if Carrara has micro-triangle displacement rendering.

Shonner, I looked at the images again in link you provided. That is quite some work. I don't think there is a cheat way to make faster modeling unless plug-in have templates to clone the prebuilt greebles. But you get some ideas what Carrara can do for you.

Maxxmodelz, I am sure that one of the plug-in developer in this community will make greeble plug-in after they review this thread. :)

I can decrease the clinder to 3 or 5 rows and use tesselate to split the geebles. An image will come soon. It is the fastest modeling I can think of.

I'd pay $30 for a Greeble plug-in right now for CP4.

Good idea to use Anything Grooves. It is difficult to make a texture map to wrap all greebles because they are tesselated. I have been trying to figure out how to do that with that many greebles. Anyone ever used Canoma before? It was very useful but expensive and buggy.

V'ger

I am thinking maybe a new shader with unique methods to get geebles textured with maps. Maybe something similiar to terrain with elevator shader but different method for greeble with building vertical, horizonal levels, and faces of which side for maps. Faces of which side function in shader would work to bring several texture maps/displacement maps. Random may be implemented with it in greeble plug-in. And size of building that may use the maps specified by user. It is alot like terrain shader functions. Faces of which side = dimension of which side on the box

"Anyone ever used Canoma before? It was very useful but expensive and buggy." Everything from MetaCreations from that time period was buggy. It was when they were selling off everything they could to abandon their loyal users to pursue the holy grail of web delivered 3D. And where are they now?

Also, if you need fully textured greebles, I would recommend using Anything Grows in a manner similar to the "build the Machine" tutorial on Eric's website.

A roadblock to a simple greeble plug is that it is not possible at this time to add plugins to the VM. . . I suppose it could be done as a new modelling room, but that seems like a lot of work. Markd

But I can't think of a situation where you'd necessarily NEED the greebles in the VM..... even if you plan to export the model as an OBJ, Anything grooves would work. I think you could even just convert it to a mesh object again after greebling it.... I'll do some more when I get home... and How did they get the bones and morphs to integrate into the VM in C4?

Meh! Modern day 3d users are so lazy. In my day we would model each building by hand and place then one at a time.... Using a command prompt!!! Joking!XD Those greeble and anything groves renders look really good!

Bones and morphs were written by Eovia. . . they hold the source, so they can do what they want. ;-) Not exposed to us plugin guys is what I meant. Maybe there is another way around it? Yeah, Agrooves works somewhat- it doesn't give you quite the degree of control and simplicity that the greeble plugin does- mostly in the iterative nature of greeble. If you had it in the VM, it would be easy to create shading domains as you go, so that streets, walls, roofs, etc were all shaded differently. Markd

Who want to color every pixel and make it look like 3D!! XD LOL!

MarkD Yep that is true. I asked Eovia for soruce code in VM room and they said no. There are lot ot things I want to implement in that room. Beazers with nurbs, better axis control, symmeterical pointers, mirrors like gemini but different methods, UV editor for map to put on faces in that room, blah blah blah.

I tried to make greebles using anything grooves last night and I could get results but not near as cool as some of the stuff on the link in message thread 21. That's some pretty nifty greebling! -Kix

Message edited on: 11/09/2004 17:57

I'd love to see a tut on how you did those, Brainmuffin. Great job.

Message edited on: 11/09/2004 18:02

just awesome stuff folks... wow can hardly wait to fool around with this type of stuff... loks very cool...

Very Nice!!! Good thread on greeble. Brainmuffin if you dont mind please post image how you made it. I never had any luck with anything glow! :( Thanks!!!

You should do an article for 3dxtract!