The 'Official' Nichimen Mirai Thread (Nendo Too)>>>

[BellicoseBloke]

Whelp... Trying some 3D painting needs much lernin'... Figured I'd try painting without making a frozen mapper to see what it does... Looks like it just makes a flat UV projection by default... But you CAN paint on the UV map view as well, no way you could do that with per face mapping...

Practice makes imperfect...

This is just diffuse channel, no bump, spec, or any other yet...

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Going a bit farther... Still painting doughnuts but this one is the sickest doughnut yet...

Painted diffuse, bump & specular this time but with the single work light there's not much impact... I guess I'll have to figger out scene lights in Mirai, which are a pain...

Just used the 'reveal' brush with appropriate texture for each channel... Somehow painting with 'Per Face' mapping tends to develop pinholes normally along where UV faces meet, but just here-there... Solved by repainting such areas at odd-oblique angles...

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Just to say, My Mirai setup runs everytime I double-click 'Start-Mirai.exe' without fail... Does not mean I won't have any future problems & some machines are 'Borderline Mirai-Friendly'...

Back in 2018 I DID get a license error because I was using Mirai on an online XP machine... Izware was still around I'm sure they buggered my license as you cannot firewall LMGRD.exe or Mirai won't work at all... Luckily the 'portable' version of Mirai is easy to fix even though you will no doubt see that it's really NOT portable...

In the image it's shows where the .mirai-1-1 folder is if you look at directory URL... Yours will be located same but with your USERNAME instead of david lebaron, which is NOT my name BTW... It's probably the name of the original owner of this machine... Of your main HDD letter is different then that will be different...

All the license crap is in there... If you have changed settings to your liking then just DELETE the inner folder... If you have done none of that then you can just delete the whole .mirai-1-1' folder... Another will be generated upon a new start of Mirai... You see the INNER folder is license stuff, the outer folder is preference settings & you can save certain files to copy to other machines for a uniform look & feel from machine to machine...

Anyways back in 2018 all I had to do was delete the inner folder & all was good again however I unplugged my broadband cable before opening Mirai again... You CAN'T firewall LMGRD.exe but you don't hafta be hooked to the internet... Piss on the internet...

That pretty much covers the running of it & maintenance like the 'toilet flushing' I talked about earlier... Different machines react different & will have either more or less processes leftover after Mirai shut down... Some there will be a 'tripX.exe' leftover running after every render, which is a pain... BTW, Everytime you render it will be in the 'TEMP' directory in a folder marked 'TripX' but in MIR format...

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Mirai was touted as a 'Sculpting System' and as other software had 'magnet moves' the deal with Mirai is that just by using a modifier key which you press & hold BEFORE the menu command turns the regular Move, Scale or whatever into a MAGNET version of that tool with a choice of falloff that blows the mind because after the ALT key modifier & before pressing the suggestion of a falloff if you hold CTRL down you get a FURTHER menu & many of those choices have further dialogs...

Being that this system is part of modeling as a whole & not a sector by itself like other 3D packages it is more versatile... nobody else ever did it like this... Even Wings3D went on to eventually have a 'sculpting mode' but by the time you have enough polygons to sculpt in Wings3D the viewport framerate is unusable 'CHUG-CHUG'... This is due to Wings3D being coded in that obscure 'ERLANG'...

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Figured I'd shoot this one as it's the same in Mirai as in Nendo... If you wanna bring in reference images you take a cube & collapse the edges so that it's flat (Nendo/Mirai still thinks it has volume) then in Nendos paint room you use reveal brush to paint image onto surface... Now if images don't align when crossed you just make adjustments in paint room & paint it again...

In Mirai you have more options to apply image to collapsed cube...

Nendo has a 20,000 polygon limit... However by combining geometry you can go way over that-

If you wanna keep polygon count down try using the 'tighten' command instead of smooth-

I think the bad idea about Nendo was they just showed peeps doing 'tinkertoy' modeling but it's capable of better, same with Amapi which is a powerful modeler & can do way more than vases...

I did the Joan-Of-Arc character back in 2019 in Nendo, preferring to put more meat on the bones...

What do you know... Someone has the old Nendo Demo on YT... You see 'tinkertoy'!...

 

[BellicoseBloke]

A bit of time done today on 'MoonHead' practice... No advanced tools or tricks just using what I would use in Nendo mostly... I certaonly need to 'exaggerate' the polygons more... Like Bay Raitt always did...

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Been testing a number of image viewers to preview the brushes & what-not... It had to have a 'favorites' or a 'batch' area or similar to drag chosen previews to then ALSO had to boldly show filename so I could choose same file in the MIR format to bring into Mirai...

Henry Kellner's Photoplorer seems to work well... It has numerous 'pinwalls' you can drag images to & pinwalls can also be saved out... Font can be made plenty big enough to read even with thumb view...


https://send.now/w6nlk69454hv

OR

https://gofile.io/d/MsbnrE

OR

https://www.sendspace.com/file/0vy5evlc

And BTW... whilst finding it here's the Strategic Engine that one needs to use the Strategic Commander on XP or later... The original software won't work... You can get these on ebay for 15-20 bucks, I have 3 of them... You then make profiles for whatever you use them with, the old ones are the ones you want... Newer ones did not have this universal shortcut ability...

https://archive.org/details/StrategicSetupv1.3

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Forgot to show that if you are focused in a viewport you can just press 'h' to see hotkeys for that window...

GEOMETRY-

ANIMATION-

In Mirai's Material channels you can have many layers in many channels all with optional blending settings... Some layer operations are only allowed once in the Mirai Domain per channel while others can be repeated...

 

[BellicoseBloke]

A number of users of other 3D packages made scripts or plugs to imitate functions in Nendo or Mirai in the few years after Mirai was no longer available... There was one for Maya 4 but I forget the name of it but it was about replicating the Mirai sculpting workflow...

Here's one for 3ds Max4... PolyMeshTools which replicates some unique model functions-

 

[BellicoseBloke]

I remember the MEL script now it was 'Claydough' & it was for Maya 4.5... It was formulated to sculpt in the exact same way Mirai did but adding Maya attributes...

BTW... I have a machine with nVidia GeForce Go 5200 & another with GeForce Go 7400 & Mirai will not run on either one, selections are garbled & sometimes whole model disappears...

 

[BellicoseBloke]

OK, For those interested in 'Nendo-Mirai'- related modelers other than the lagging Wings3D (ERLANG) a very good one to try is gSculpt, which seems to have all the Wings3D feature set & a bit more...

Unlike Mirai-Nendo-Wings3D in gSculpt you can also model polygon-by-polygon... You can also do quad mesh retopo over a smoothed template mesh like in Modo & others... It has history so you can go back & adjust... the cut tool looks alot like XSI's, which is a good thing...

The GUI workflow is not at all like Mirai-Nendo-Wings3D... It is a 'validation' action modeler like Amapi3D or Hexagon you must press the 'DONE' button when finished with a procedure or appropriate hotkey...

However one can go way high in polygon count like in Mirai... I like the tabbed viewport option & you can add more tabs as wished...

It's pretty intuitive....

Here-

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gsculpt/files/gsculpt/

Home page-

https://gsculpt.sourceforge.net/

Documentation-

https://gsculpt.sourceforge.net/docs.html

Some video tuts done in a much earlier version-

https://gsculpt.sourceforge.net/video_tutorials.html

Apparently Developer was inspired by the old 'CyberSculpt'-

https://web.archive.org/web/20021021010705/http://asterius.com/atari/cybersculpt


Now gSculpt ONLY models, there's no UV, no paint & it just exports OBJ or VRML97 however it will import an OBJ also...

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Aligning head images for modeling can sometimes be a pain...

Luckily I found TWO images of Florence Pugh from same photo shoot with one a near exact profile side view plus front... However these were the ONLY two good images out of over 900 I had downloaded, there are certainly plenty of texture ref images in the rest....

The hair is up exposing the ear which is great... Could've done without the ear trinkets & make-up...

I first used Vertus Fluid Mask to cutout the BGs then used Photoline 32 12.51 which is 20 years old now but I found there was some features that went missing in later versions so I use this one...

Here if wished-

https://send.now/9tc7mxxlag4i

Or

https://www.sendspace.com/file/bge2xhrx


Some peeps like to place front & side next to each other & draw grid lines on a new layer but it's tough to see when/if your side view needs 'canted' or in other words rotated to match the snapped camera angle of the front... In this case I had to rotate the side forward or 'down' to match the front while having front layer at 60% opacity so I can see through...

It can be a challenge when combining a front/side from completely different shoots & very hard to get side profile pics that are not canted a bit towards the camera so NOT good for modeling with...

The modeling is only gonna be as good as the ref images...

Anyways have a look or use-

Transparent GIF-

JPG with Chartreuse BG-

Here's probably one of the better places to obtain images of actresses or athletes or models... No ads or crap just images on a server as long as there's a face you like-

http://www.digitalminx.com/photos/

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Ok in general 'rough' order here is some images on how to setup ref images in Nendo... Haven't done it in Mirai but it is very similar... Being Nendo & Mirai's way of modeling the best way to have ref images is a 'cross' at world center... In this way you can model in perspective view at any angle...

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Cracking On-

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Figuring out setting scene lights in Mirai... It's not that bad but touchy if you do operations in a bizarre way... Good to save scene at every significant step & remember that if Mirai crash then CrackLock cannot set time forward again you gotta do manually...

Also if you want grid to not be visible then it's in preferences but it won't transpire until you restart Mirai-

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Well... Mirai's render engine is rather simple but the materials composition is quite complex... Been trying to figure out the 'Oblique' FX loading into secondary layers... Nothing earthshattering yet...

Seems like for the damn $6,495.00 there would've been at least a minimal library of examples... Piss...

But-

 

[BellicoseBloke]

OK, Back to business... Figured I'd do the same setup in Mirai as I did in Nendo for Florence Pugh ref images...

It's actually easier, same concept but you don't hafta paint images on flattened cubes... You make cube same size as your image in the plane it's gonna face leaving the edges to be collapsed alone until you collapse them...

You have to make a planar mapper for each & have to translate attributes from Mirai domain to OpenGL-

 

[BellicoseBloke]

Had a small version of this earlier... Igor Posavec was a prolific Mirai user... You would think he made his Mah Indian in Nendo but apparently it was modeled in Mirai then sent over to Nendo to be exported out... No explanation was given for this but there must've been a reason... The geometry was then brought into 3ds Max 3.1 to finish out-

Bonobo Sneer by John Feather-

Vig Expressions by same-

 

[BellicoseBloke]

For Modeling & 2D/3D Paint Mirai is pretty solid... But it looks like developers didn't much take such care to other areas which is a shock considering the $6,495.00 price tag... Simple layering material channels can cause a crash & I'm not even talking anything going on bizarre... This can also happen just changing a value then CTRL/RT-Clik render there the error is again... Most of the time not recoverable, perhaps 1 or 2 times out of 10 you can hit 'RESET' & it's OK & most always there's no way to save out in this state... Pushing 'CONTINUE' just cements the crash even more & pressing 'DEBUG' brings up the console but before you can read anything Mirai then finishes crashing & disappears...

So I proclaim this area of Mirai to be pre-alpha even though the frickin' thing was for sale at major dollars, I suppose if one valued the Model-Paint aspect at the 6.5 thousand dollars then it is justified but the promotion was that it could do all this other stuff too... I would've traveled to SoCal just to throw the developers around their cubicles If I woulda bought it & this had happened>>>

Another aspect I noticed is bringing in models... Not like This Jabba The Hut but SYMMETRICAL OBJs... Then centering & deleting half the model to get a virtual mirror going... ERROR! So model generation pretty much is internal then export I would not bring anything in...