Disabled Video Post Effects

Al

So I'm all hyped up to start using video post for the first time in Max. Unfortunately, my queue is greyed out (I'm assuming that means disabled), and therefore max won't apply any of my settings. I can't for the life of me find a way to turn it on.

Any help?

Thanks

Chris2005

If you double click the individual effect, it should bring up a window, that allows you tick a box to turn that event on or off.

Al

Hmm. That wasn't it. Turns out all of the events were already enabled, Max just won't apply them to the scene. I've assigned Object ID's, and the VP Queue shows the effects applied to the scene, but when I render the image...not there. I disabled an effect, and it turned a different shade of grey in the window. I am using the student license version available for college students. Could it be that video post just isn't available in this version?

Chris2005

Al wrote: »

Hmm. That wasn't it. Turns out all of the events were already enabled, Max just won't apply them to the scene. I've assigned Object ID's, and the VP Queue shows the effects applied to the scene, but when I render the image...not there. I disabled an effect, and it turned a different shade of grey in the window. I am using the student license version available for college students. Could it be that video post just isn't available in this version?

What are the VP events you are trying to apply, I can barely see the thumbnail...

Al

Yeah, sorry, the screen capture didn't do a very good job.

I am applying a scene event to the camera to have motion blur, and then I have a lens effect flare and glow.

Chris2005

Al wrote: »

Yeah, sorry, the screen capture didn't do a very good job.

I am applying a scene event to the camera to have motion blur, and then I have a lens effect flare and glow.

Motion blur won't show up, unless objects are moving, and won't be very noticeable if the motion is slow, is the flare on a light, in max, you must pick a light for the flare to show up on...

Al

Objects do move and the flare is centered on a sphere and looks very nice in the preview. The glow doesn't do anything in the preview. From what I can tell from various tutorials, the only difference in my setup is that my VP queue is completely grayed out like it's unavailable or not applicable. I was trying to show that with the thumbnail--it shows that all of my effects are gray instead of black like in every video tutorial I've watched on VP.

Chris2005

Al wrote: »

Objects do move and the flare is centered on a sphere and looks very nice in the preview. The glow doesn't do anything in the preview. From what I can tell from various tutorials, the only difference in my setup is that my VP queue is completely grayed out like it's unavailable or not applicable. I was trying to show that with the thumbnail--it shows that all of my effects are gray instead of black like in every video tutorial I've watched on VP.

I'm not sure which version of Max you are using, however, as long as the bars to the right, are dark blue, and not gray, the effect is enabled.

Flares will only appear on lights, for some reason, even with third party flares, they won't show up on anything but lights...

Al

Yeah, even if I set my flare to a light it doesn't work.

I'm using the max 2010 educational version. The bars are blue, but the text for "queue" and the other effects are all grayed out in a lighter gray than if I disable the effect. I think that that is my problem. I think the light gray text means in some way that VP is deactivated or not installed or whatever, and unless I can turn some feature on to get the text to go black, VP won't work at all.

At this point I'm thinking it's a program glitch or a limitation on the edu version. Thanks for all your help I really appreciate it. I think I'm going to go take this up with Autodesk.

Chris2005

Al wrote: »

Yeah, even if I set my flare to a light it doesn't work.

I'm using the max 2010 educational version. The bars are blue, but the text for "queue" and the other effects are all grayed out in a lighter gray than if I disable the effect. I think that that is my problem. I think the light gray text means in some way that VP is deactivated or not installed or whatever, and unless I can turn some feature on to get the text to go black, VP won't work at all.

At this point I'm thinking it's a program glitch or a limitation on the edu version. Thanks for all your help I really appreciate it. I think I'm going to go take this up with Autodesk.

The text appears the same way in max 2011, it's just the UI colors, they have set... it should work... however, I'm not sure what the problem is...

I'd contact Autodesk, because I'm at a loss myself... b/c I don't have a clue what could be causing the issue.

Melak

If all you are using is motionblur and flares, you probably don't need videopost. Both of those effects can be added from the environment & effects menu, and should work better from there. (this doesn't really solve oyur problem but might let you work around it )


Although motionblur can also be enabled from the camera itself by turning on the "multi-pass effects", I think this is a really old feature and you might be better off not using that.



If you are using mental ray, there are quite a number of ways to apply motionblur there, some faster than others.
Here's a video tut about using motion blur in mr: http://max.cgcookie.com/2010/03/26/tip-motion-blur-in-mental-ray/

This is another trick you can apply to make it even faster. This info might be out of date though so I can't tell you if it still works
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=1963026&postcount=6

I think there is a motionblur camera shader too, I don't know how that compares speed and quality wise, might be worth looking into. But this should get you started.

PS: Have you considered doing motionblur in Post ?(After Effects etc.) It's usually faster than doing it in-app.

Also, if you could post a scene file maybe we could make some better observations

L2K

using the scanline, you need to activate the motion blur on the objects themselves.
select all, right click, object motion blur.
the image motion blur exists too, and is faster. but its real crappy.

if the motion blur object seems to you a bit low, if you can clearly see 8 same objects superposing themselves, the samples are too low, and in the render>renderer you can pull them up. 16 will be more than enough, but requires slightly more time to be computed.

it needs to be set up in the render, not the post effect (really, does anyone really still use that ?)

Chris2005

L2K wrote: »

using the scanline, you need to activate the motion blur on the objects themselves.
select all, right click, object motion blur.
the image motion blur exists too, and is faster. but its real crappy.

if the motion blur object seems to you a bit low, if you can clearly see 8 same objects superposing themselves, the samples are too low, and in the render>renderer you can pull them up. 16 will be more than enough, but requires slightly more time to be computed.

it needs to be set up in the render, not the post effect (really, does anyone really still use that ?)

I still use the Video Post for the starfield, etc. plus it's just easier to me, I've used the Render dialog on occasion.