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

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

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

Here's an example application of using greeble in 3dsMax. Geometry from Greeble can be created in the viewport or at rendertime only, but unlike a normal map, it does actually alter/add to existing geometry.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.

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 :)

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. Anything Grooves would do similar for any shape you might choose.

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

My city method similiar to greeble City method 1

City method 2

City method 3

City method 4

City method 5

You can switch it to nurb for smooth to make city a "Bubble City" City method 6

You may change preview mode to flat to see the city better without highlight/shininess City method 7

Rendered with HDRI City method 8

Other perspective of rendered city with HDRI and bump on graved street City method 9 That is my last image to post

" 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.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.

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

But how quick can GWeb make this?

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

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

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.

Other City method upon Shonner's request City method 10

Select faces you want to use dynmanic extrusion with. (use shift key to select multiple faces) City method 11

"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.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.

City method 12

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.

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

I am programmer but I really think that it is too difficult to satisify customers with greeble plug-in because some customers might want different greeble methods. Template of prebuilt greebles with random function would be nice. Here is final rendered with HDRI

Here's My attempt, using Anything Grooves. This is basically just a noise map with the Mosaic filter applied. I spent more time typing this message than I did setting up the greebles. I'm going to experiment tomorrow with some planned greeble maps...I might even come up with a whole set.

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

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

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

-Kix

Here's some more greebles with Anything Grooves. This time I made tileable maps in photoshop for the bumps. The top one is a single 64x64 square tiled seamlessly. For the bottom one I used that same 64x64 square, and another one, which I duplicated and rotated to fill a 256x256 square. I used the same maps along with the color gradient function to control the color and glow channels. Tomorrow I'm going to try some Anything Grows Greebling......

Yeah, Anything Grooves greebles very nicely...

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

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

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!

Actually, that's a great idea! I was looking for something to submit..... I'll do it now. I don't know if I'm too late for Nov. or not... Am I, Brian?

I'm pretty sure he is wrapping the current issue in the next few days. .. . wait for next month and make it more complete. (with lots of maps for us lazy sluggers ;-) Maybe falconperigot can contribute the nice one he used on the sphere? Markd

That's kind of you Markd. I'll happily let brainmuffin have it if he wants to include it.

I'd be glad to, FP. You can e-mail it to me @ thebrain.brainmuffin.studios@verizon.net

You're welcome! I like the look of it- can't quite put my finger on it, but I know I like it. Maybe the bits of lighting? Or the fade to gray? Looks like a future asteroid city. . . In another vein, I was pondering (during my commute) whether it would be possible to do something more procedural. If you added/multiplied a bunch of shaders together, it should be possible to get adjustable layers of greeble effect. . . I'll try and play with it later today. If the tree gets too awkward but the idea seems sound, I'll make a custom shader for generating greebles with Agrooves. Markd

"Squares" work quite nicely... (that's what I used for the flecks of light in my image above - glow channels squares with a low threshold.) THis is AGrooves using a proceedural shader. All that I did here was change the value sliders to give the different results but the threshold and tile numbers would give a lot of variation. Will email you the pic, BM. :-)

That's cool. Thanks for the pic, btw. What I'm working on is similar, except I'm using small tileable maps, and I'm planning on mixing them with a procedural mixer.

I spent 15 minute on this model with dynamic extrusion. I think it is the only true modeling tool for greeble. It need improved tesselate to put multiple grids to save me some time on the windows. City method 14

Rendered image with GI City method 15

Windows study Right greeble is with nurbs. City method 16