new evasion tool...looks amazing!

[WilliamVaughan]

http://www.evasion3d.com/sp_prodinfo.html

[Elmar Moelzer]

Hey, cool stuff!!!
Those guys over at evasion are really cool!
CU
Elmar

[Beamtracer]

http://www.evasion3d.com/gfx/spectrum/thumbs/t_diff_2.jpg http://www.evasion3d.com/gfx/spectrum/thumbs/t_diff_1.jpg http://www.evasion3d.com/gfx/spectrum/thumbs/t_disp_beta_1.jpg

The refraction is amazing using this plug-in!

[milkman]

evasion's tools look great... but i'm not impressed at all with their communication skills. I've emailed them 3-4 times and they still have not emailed me back. This has been a few months now.

[trick]

Originally posted by milkman
evasion's tools look great... but i'm not impressed at all with their communication skills. I've emailed them 3-4 times and they still have not emailed me back. This has been a few months now.


Yes, no communications...no demos (maybe ONE)...seems they are not of this time !!!

[Neil_Campbell]

Me, I've always found evasion responsive and helpful.

So now we get dispersion and diffraction in LW - nice. Really good lens flare tools as well (but damn, they'll have to be used really carefully otherwise they're really going to totally overpower an image).


The only concerns I have about this new tool are the way it's presented.

- The explanation of how the tool works is a little light on detail, and there are a number of minor errors that have crept in.

- I also think that many of the sample images and product illustrations have the colour banding showing far too prominently, so the photoreal element is diluted. Given that most people will probably buy this for creating photoreal glass and the like, that's not ideal.

- Also they seem not to have used AA for some of the images, which makes it harder to see how smooth the transition is and again detracts from the photoreal aspect.

All that said, I'm a sucker for anything evasion makes, so will probably be buying it anyway ;)

[Hervé]

They were ALWAYS super responsive... very cool people, I have all their plugs (except Microvave), I even e-mailed them scenes and they answered in 2 hours with the scene corrected !! Also it all depends if you bored them, or if you ask the type of question they dont like to hear... (I did not say YOU did, I just say so...)

[trick]

Originally posted by Hervé
......if you bored them...

Is this a GUESS, an OFFICIAL statement or do you know them PERSONALLY.....

I'm being BORED by my clients ALL the time and I'm ALWAYS responsive !!!

[Neil_Campbell]

Well I don't know about boring, but I've asked them some pretty mundane questions in the past, and gotten answers. I've also asked technical questions, and again gotten answers. And they do accept constructive criticism without getting defensive, and look to how they can improve their products and services (I have first hand experience of that when I worked with Ivan on their revised HyperSmooth website).

I've also found them incredibly fast at turning around fixes. Again, regarding HyperSmooth, they had a problem with this plugin when it was first released, with artefacting and other difficulties with multi-threading. I spent some time working with Ivan and the team at evasion late one evening exploring what the problems were for a couple of users, then went to bed. I was somewhat surprised the next morning to find they had worked through most of the night and released a stable update that fixed all the bugs - all while I was sound asleep. Talk about responsive!

And like Herve, I've bought all their plugins (except Microwave, simply because I don't need that type of functionality) and have never regretted it for a second. Sure they're not cheap, but these plugins add stacks of speed / functionality to LightWave.

And I bought Spectrum last night as well, and it is awesome. Re my previous comments around the output, having played with it I can confirm that Spectrum provides total control over the quality of output (ie the number of samples, and so can remove stepping without having to crank up AA) as well as the strength of the effects. So you can have subtle or garish, depending on the effect you're after.

IMHO, evasion is up there with Worley both in terms of the quality of their products and their professionalism. I personally can't recommend them highly enough

:D

[Hervé]

I dunno them personnaly, but Ivan is THE COOLEST guy, for the bored, just some people that were always asking the same question, (hassle a bit) about X-dof and Volumetrics (coz at that time it was not said it could not cope with it.... oh and also always the same qestion about how super memory hungry is SD2, and now some other developers making fun of them stating the X_dof of evasion does not even support volumetrcs when this new suppposed I_dof does it fro $49... well besides that you can ask whatever you want...

Let's go buy this new toy...
(for sure now at least we know dispertion and the likes wont be in 8... he he...)

Later

[Simon]

On the occasions I've mailed Evasion, I've been more than happy with the help they've given ... they seemed very willing to help out ... and XDof is a fantastic product so I'm very tempted with this new one:)

XDof and I_dof aren't the same type of product though so it would be unfair for anyone to try and compare them. From what I gather I_dof is a jazzed up version of the custom object 'Depth-Of-Field Display' that already comes with LW.

Simon.

[Hervé]

You see what I mean.... quote from the I-dof site....

"Volumetric Support

It's very easy to spend a fortune on Depth of Field plug-ins, only to find out later that your plug-in doesn't work with Volumetrics. How dissappointing!"

This is a bit an attack directly pointed towards Evasion...

[pixelmonk]

I'll be curious to see what the L8 SDK offers third party developers. I can only imagine the nifty features that had to be sidelined untll new features and code were added to core of LW.

[cavalos]

oh my god...at last a good solution for dispersion and diffraction.
Now the question is where can I get the money for that? :)

Best
Christian

[cavalos]

The videos are amazing...this thing is just great.

[riki]

It looks great but I guess if not used with a certain amount of subtlety it could end up like lens flare. I guess that point could hold true with many FX.

Is there a way of acheieving this FX without the plug?

[Simon]

I've always liked this tut! it can make some nice effects:

http://lw-fin.org/tutorials/asa/prisma/tutorial_prisma.html

Here was a quick test combined with the interference shader, could probably look a lot better with some tweaking:

[phrick]

Spectrum looks awesome!

Has anybody bought this baby yet?
If so, could you please tell us a little about it.
How slow/fast it renders and that kind of stuff...