redaborchardt
If by coil you mean the thread, I can do a 1 minute tutorial on that if you like.

Sure, thanks Also can I see a larger version of your first screen capture; the one containing the network ?

Christopher R

redaborchardt
If by coil you mean the thread, I can do a 1 minute tutorial on that if you like.

Sure, thanks Also can I see a larger version of your first screen capture; the one containing the network ?

There you go. Quick tutorial.

Good tutorial

I didn't quite understand why the following did not give the proper results but putting @ptnum in a variable worked ?

I think it's because ptnum is treated as an Integer, meaning whole numbers only. That would explain the jump you get instead of the smooth interpolation between whole units.

By declaring a float, I get around that issue. There might be a more elegant solution to this.

How did you do the coil from post #12 ?

Let me do a tutorial on that too tomorrow

Here is your tutorial. I hope you will find it useful.

Excellent, thank you

redaborchardt
Here is your tutorial. I hope you will find it useful.

Hi Reda, great work on the project so far! A-ok with you if we publish that tutorial in our social channels?

- Chris

Of course. That would be my pleasure.

Here are some chain links with tutorial

Since my entire model is made of SubD cages, it looks like I have reached the stage where my 6 core i7 in Mantra is outpacing my GTX 1080 in Octane. The time it takes to pre-process the scene in Octane is almost 1 minute.

I reached a real low yesterday night because I don't seem to be making the progress that I was hoping for. The mind boggling number of shading and rendering options in Mantra is making me feel really stupid.

Anyway, today I managed to get to a stage where the basic shader I built in Mantra looks somewhat acceptable.

Slowly getting to a stage where the shaders are starting to look probable at scale and the object seems to be made by man made tools.

After yesterday's low, I have now hit a high. Looking back at the progress, it does seem like the time I am spending learning Mantra is paying off.

Today is a good day. It feels like the victory of willpower over fear, uncertainty and doubt.

My confidence in my ability to get Mantra to do what I want is increasing. I have definitely overcome a mental block.
Mantra still boggles my mind tho!

Lovely chains

Wrapping up the day.

A new day has started

Quick test render under different conditions to check that I haven't done anything utterly stupid with the shaders.
I have stopped using the Disney shader and now using Mantra Surface nodes.

The irregular cog army has arrived