new features: testers questions

Hi Kim,
Fooled you, didnt we that was only kidding,
dont take it personal please.

Since last April both Dan an me have been competing to be the top Betatester.
And I won the mousemat , but I cut it in half and shared it with Dan.
Not altogether bad for a bunch of seasoned last century professional mourner-relicts.

Thank you for the explanations anyway.
A brief historical overview is always appreciated.
Part of the introductional text for KT 2008 we do have now.

-- --------------------------------- ---------------------------- --
try out all the buttons, observe and find some

[giannis]

can anyone point me to the EXIT PORTAL thingy??
according to fletch's early post.. its supposed to be a material or did i misunderstand??? i know its right under my nose.. but i just cant find it!
thanks!

i was testing paul russams church and noticed a few things...
when rendering the WHOLE scene with PM+FG + AA (med) i get some broken faces as shown in fig
but when rendering with PPT it renders out correctly...
for both test i used 4 threads... i tried rendering with one thread (coz its know that pm+fg has some issues with multi threading) but the problem persists...

i copied the SU component into a fresh file and rendered it... but theres no issue... any thoughts???

P.s : i used the new su2kt (unreleased) beta version provided by tomaz to export this mega structure..

[ToMasz]

I have never tried this scene with PM&FG without instancing and now
with instancing. I think PM&FG with such a big scene (ca. 2,700,000 triangles) can fail. Will try it on my machine.

Tomasz

Hi jj,

you can find the sky portal in the basic materials library you downloaded with RC3.

Kind regards

Fry has , it KT you don't need to use a "box". You can use a simple plane that covers completely the opening and that's normal is directed to inside.

I have find that Sky Portal does give a very little speedup. Also if one uses sky portals in a scene there should be no way for a light ray to exit or enter the scene other than through a portal.

Hey, Kim!
Sorry if my words sounded offensive to you; surely it wasn't my intention
Fact is that I (don't want to generalise) am spending a lot of time looking for new tools and features (knowing nothing about them), instead of simply put them to work.
An example of how hungry I was to learn all the new things in RC3 is the fact that I wasn't able to find "Bitmap Coordinates" option by myself, although I opened the "Tools" ten times every session

As I said before, I was a SU beta-tester for many years and, every time a new beta was to be tested, I received a short mail explaining what's new, how to use the new features and what to look for... but I must admit that @Last (now Google...) had an entire army behind their program and this is not the case with KT.

To conclude, please be patient with us, the older ones, take example from Giannis who simply answered my stupid question

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your reply...
No apology is needed, I didn't feel offended personally...

I fully understand that you want to know as much as possible about new features, how they work etc., and like I wrote I also feel that we try to do our best to inform you about what new features you (the RC beta-testing team) need to look after, and likewise explain to you how these works...

Like you say yourself... KT consist only of a very small team... All are doing this on a volunteer basis because we feel dedicated to the program and want to help Giannis in any possible ways...
Unfortunately this also means that when it comes to the documentation, it's not as good as we would like it to be...
Personally I feel that we've come a long way... As a good example, before KT2007, we only had some very basic tutorials... And I mean really, really basic... Now we have the Getting Started (even available in English, French and Brasilian Portuguese... ), the Material Editor, Alpha Mask, Walkthrough Animation tutorials and a couple more...

I know that Patrick is preparing a new Material Editor tutorial, and I'm working on a new separate SU2KT tut and a new Getting Started tut... Furthermore, Fletch has made some video tutorials and it's my understanding that he's preparing some more...

You also need to acknowledge, that making a written tutorial/manual, is NOT an easy task... Especially not since this isn't my full time job... This is something I need to do in my spare time... (my wife tells me that my eyes are starting to look more square... Don't know what she means, but I do like the nice tan I've got from sitting so much in front of my computer screen... )

Bottom line - and like I mentioned above - is...
We sure want to share all the knowledge etc. we have...
If you have questions about something in particular, please don't hesitate to ask, and we'll be happy to help you explaining...

Hope this clarifies...

Cheers
Kim Frederik

personally it still boggles my mind how you guys manage to do such a great product with so few resources.

i should know, i work in a really, really big software organisation in building and releasing.

Lekonna your question is revealing Having resources is not mainly a matter of having material riches. It is firstly and most essentialy a matter of having love fot the thing you do. This, exactly, is the case here And, as all we know, in commercial fields the things nearly always, more or less, become a mere obligation. And the chasm between having to accomplish something from mere obligation and from love and devotion is abysmally deep

Continuing comparing-tests, essentially from lack of simple recent 3d-scenes.
From April in KTIntelB, same settings (higher resolution)
PPT 315 passes
Finished in 1 hours, 26 minutes and 49 seconds!
Results are simular, cannot remark on fastness as I have no log from the previous render.

If there is a specific topic that needs to be tested please let it be known,
preferably with a simple test-scene provided also, so several OS-ses and configurations can be tested.

BTW ExtremeF. I sincerely agree with you (on your previous post above), and generally more and more these days, I find..
and also always with a smile too.

any more luck with Portals, Notareal?
I've had no luck. They get more light into my scene but slow the render down to making portals unusable for me...