Lightwave Plugin of the Week: DP Instance
Denis Pontonnier is well known around these parts for greatly expanding the possibilities of Lightwave. Some of his plug-ins allow you to do things in Lightwave that would otherwise be impossible, or at the very least, very difficult. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that he makes these tools available as freeware, although he does accept donations via PayPal.
This week I’m highlighting his DP Instance plugin. Why? Well, because it is pretty cool, and because I already have a video made showing how to get started using it.
DP Instance is a volumetric plugin for scattering instances of objects throughout your scene. The effect is like cloning your objects except that instances do not require as much RAM as your clones would, plus you won’t have hundreds or thousands of separate objects clogging up the scene editor or object lists in Layout.
It looks like the documentation on the website has been updated, so if you’ve had this plug-in a while, it might be worth going back to dpont’s site to check out the docs and download the latest version.
One downside to using instances, is that the instances do not show up in render buffers. If you want to do a separate reflection or diffuse shading pass or something, you’ll have to do it manually by making special versions of your objects and scene for each pass.
Compatibility:
DP Instance is available for:
Win32
Win64 (courtesy of Marvin Landis)
Mac UB 32 & 64-bit (courtesy of Mike Wolf)
I should point out that HD Instance from Happy-Digital is also a volumetric instancing plugin. It has some different features, better documentation, may be a little easier to use and is renders significantly faster than DP Instance. I do not have the latest version of HD_Instance, so I cannot compare them accurately.
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6 Comments to Lightwave Plugin of the Week: DP Instance
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HDInstance is massively faster than DPInstance, in terms of render speed. The downside is no Mac64 build of HDInstance has been released yet. The developer is working on it, but the license control code is being awkward. Yay for DRM.
I thought there might be a significant speed difference. Thank you for letting confirming that. I will add that to the post.
It is obvious that speed for instancing has a price,
I have some ideas but needs intensive testing
in various situations, because they can be destructive
in complex situations like radiosity + reflection etc..
That needs a better configuration that mine,
but I think that users have not been abused
by me, there was no promise about performances.
If you still have a frustration with such
free tool, please ellaborate or send detailed
report, crap comments are just a waste of time.
Denis.
…he calls your plugin “cool” there is no crap(!) :/
I intended no offense with my comments. I merely wanted to point out some differences between the two instancing plugins, and that there may be reasons why someone would need to spend the money on HD Instance when yours is freeware.
We are all very grateful that you make the plugins that you do, and I am in awe of the plugins you are writing. The number, variety and depth of your tools is amazing.
dwburman
..No problem with you Dana and thanks for support.
Main, first and liminary comment is from Phil,
he is not correct for a while with our work,
more bashing than argumenting.
no real interest, provocative,
ambiguous words in the NT forum,
was even pretending that he buyed this product,
as a justification for his behavior,
‘fancifullness’ or perception problems?
I had always good words about Kray and HD instancing tools,
users of other tools tend to simply copy/paste their usual settings in DPI,
but its behavior and features may be different,
like for the Surface Distribution,
this possible confusion was the main reason for me,
to suggest and try to moderate the comparaison
in the NT forum.
Differences of speed with other tools
have been noticed from the beginning,
were reported at beta stage, preprocess
and render speed was then optimized a lot.
From a serious report, render time
with Windows versions (not sure for Mac)
can be really fast but without reflection
let say 250000 * 150000 polys with shadows
and interpolated radiosity,
on a modest configuration, not a beast.
Render time invoking raytracing is a deep subject,
still fascinating a lot of developers on this planet,
at least I’m proud to know that DPI is stable
in this domain.
Hopefully enhanced Nodal Distribution,
will be appreciated by creative lightwavers.
Denis.