Particle related problem.

VDMX clips tend to be VDMX specific.

They depend upon input and output ports being published so that they can be automatically fed into and rendered out of within VDMX itself.

This means that there shall be specific input and output ports that let the compositions work within VDMX, for instance video input.

Whatever else would need to be set to an explicit value at input can also have been 'broken' whilst being tinkered with in QC. Check to see if all the necessary noodles are hooked up and that the requisite input and output ports have been published to route with the names that VDMX requires.

Once one has broken a published port then what once was a perfectly good VDMX composition will fail in that application.

Hope that helps.

hey, thanks for your answer.. i deleted all the input ports and it doesn't work again... But while searching forum i released something , my QC was working in 64 Bit mode, so i change it 32 Bit, and it works alright now :)

Hadn't covered that 32 / 64 bit base, always worth looking at on SL.

I wasn't meaning that one delete input / output ports.

I meant that they might have needed to be re-published if they were no longer accessible to VDMX.

could you explain how you change QC to work at 32bit...

cheers - bAjA

Find the location of the QC app in your Developer folder. Highlight it by clicking on it, then push "Control"; you will have an option for "Get Info". Select that, and on that window, you will see an option for running the app in 32 bit, in a check box.

Thanks for that gtoledo3... It would seam that particle projects that i made in 64bit mode do not render in QC if I open it in 32bit...

But if i make a new particle composition in 32bit these indeed work in QC and VDMX.

What are the implications of running QC in 32bit ? will this slow down other patches?

cheers - bAjA

Running in 32 bit mode enables the functionality of plugins that are only 32 bit based; any plugins that are 32 / 64 bit are functional in either mode.

If you have enabled Graph Foundation logging then you will see, in 64 bit mode, that plugins like Datamosh and some v002 plugins won't work - they won't load.

In 32 bit mode you'll get the usual reading of no plugins failing.

That's about it.

You can also get some rough and ready idea of what will run in the different runtimes by using the Test in Runtime option from the File menu.

Off the top of my head, I don't think that Particle Tools populates the patch list in 64 bit mode, so I'm slightly confused about the "making in 64 bit" part of the question. Maybe I'm wrong and they do populate the patch list... but I didn't think so.

If you're talking about Leopard stuff not restoring correctly (that ALWAYS ran in 32 bit), there are a couple of lingering issues with blend modes and the way certain particle render patches perform inside of render in image. Try switching blend modes and try different particle render patches to isolate which patch is the problem.

I've run SL in 32 bit and 64 bit extensively. The main problem I see is that the "code inspectors" don't work correctly in 32 bit mode, when one highlights all of the code (in an OpenCL, GLSL, and maybe others), and hit "delete"... at that point, one gets a "beachball" and possible graphic shmegma around the inspector panel where one enters the code. Sometimes, it will even crash. However, if one just back through the code, and deletes it line/character at a time, this usually doesn't happen.

Other than that, there are problems with some of the new patches, mainly. Old stuff works well, save for the iterator being slower, and the replicate in time being broken. OpenCL kernel is a little unstable while editing in 32 bit mode, as I mentioned, but in addition, sometimes having an empty kernel makes all of QC crash, or causes a kernel panic, even with the Viewer window off/not evaluating the graph.

Sooo, 32 bit is pretty good for most things. If I get heavy into editing OpenCL, I usually flip to 64. However, the 64 bit programmed kernels usually run fine in 32.

Thanks both of you... this is real useful information.

As i don't yet add much code to my compositions 32bit should be fine, apart from i'm sad to hear the iterator runs slower.

The particle tools where showing up in 32 and 64bit modes and i did indeed have some problems with blend modes.

So to confirm, in terms of VDMX how does it know which mode to run the compositions in? is this dependent on what mode QC was in when the composition was saved ?

cheers - bAjA

Iterator performance shouldn't be noticeably different between QC-4.0 32bit and QC-4.0 64bit --- I believe @gtoledo3 was referring to the difference in Iterators between QC-3.x and QC-4.0.

VDMX has no way to know which mode to run compositions in, since this information is not stored in the composition file. Unless it's doing a rather awkward workaround, VDMX is going to run all of your compositions in the same mode as VDMX itself is running in. "Get Info" on VDMX.app in Finder.

Also, Kineme ParticleTools patches cannot appear in the Patch Library when running QC-4.0 in 64bit mode, since the plugin bundle is 32bit-only and thus doesn't get loaded by the runtime environment.

[Update: The latest VDMX appears to be 32bit-only, so it will presumably always run your compositions in 32bit mode.]

If i untick the run in 32bit box and then launch QC i can indeed see all the particle patches in the library. is there a way to double check if QC is running at 64 or 32 ?

As for VDMX I made two test particle comps, one made with QC launched in 64bit and one in 32bit. (see attached) Only the the 32bit comp renders in VDMX, i'm sure you will have a better idea of what this implies than me...

At this point I have a happy way to work with particles in VDMX, i'm just reporting back my findings for the record. Would also like to take the opportunity to thank Kineme for such great work all round, so often its your plug-ins that provide the vital key to me realizing my quartz missions.

cheers - bAjA

bAjA wrote:
If i untick the run in 32bit box and then launch QC i can indeed see all the particle patches in the library.

I apologize; my memory failed me --- ParticleTools 0.3 does include a 64bit binary (and thus the patches should appear in the patch library), but it is known to behave erratically in 64bit mode.

There are some issues in the design of the library ParticleTools depends upon --- it's nontrivial to fix, the author does not have plans to fix it, and I haven't had a chance to rewrite it yet.

bAjA wrote:
is there a way to double check if QC is running at 64 or 32 ?

Install KinemeCore. Under the K menu, select "Editor Status".

bAjA wrote:
As for VDMX I made two test particle comps, one made with QC launched in 64bit and one in 32bit. (see attached) Only the the 32bit comp renders in VDMX, i'm sure you will have a better idea of what this implies than me...

Very interesting.. I presume that this is another artifact of 32/64bit data misalignment internal to the library ParticleTools uses. This could help explain some of what's going on.

For the short term, as you've noted, develop and run in 32bit mode. And in the long term, we hope to produce a ground-up rewrite of ParticleTools.

bAjA wrote:
Would also like to take the opportunity to thank Kineme for such great work all round, so often its your plug-ins that provide the vital key to me realizing my quartz missions.

Great! Thanks for your support.