Ephere Lab review
Performance
I’m happy to report that Lab itself is multi-threaded in multiple ways. Structuring your graph to run the nodes concurrently is key to maximizing core usage. The responsiveness of Lab’s GUI is very good and the fact that you can group nodes together makes it easier to create manageable flows. Fairly frequently I have run into bugs (at the time of writing this article, I was using 1.0.4.0). Thankfully they don’t crash 3DS Max allowing you to save your scene (and your Lab graph) before restarting. As for Ephere’s support, they have been quick at responding to any issues. However, at this stage, I would say that Lab is not as stable as I’d like it to be.
Creating a plugin
Mesh2Spline plugin created by Tobbe Olsson using Lab
In order to put Lab to the test I created a modifier that turns a mesh into a spline that follows the mesh’s vertex order. With some simple math I was able to include a start and end user input (in percentage) and by animating those values you get the effect of the spline traveling or growing along the mesh. Once I understood technically how to make this plugin, it was extremely quick to put together the graph.
I have some nagging issues as I’d like to take it further. One such issue is that I can’t change the interpolation of my spline vertices. Lab does not allow access to 3DS Max-specific information although it is supposedly possible to access Maxscript through the C# node by referencing an Autodesk DLL, but I can’t confirm this since I have no idea how this is done and there’s no documentation on doing this.
However I did feel a nice sense of accomplishment when I got to where it’s at and this particular example ended up being quite easy. Once I was done with the plugin, I saved it out as a re-usable plugin but after restarting 3DS Max it showed up as a spline object instead of a modifier. This is because Lab determines the type of plugin by the graph’s inputs and outputs and since mine outputs a spline it decided to save it out as a spline object. At the moment there’s no way around this.
If you want to play around with the custom plugin, you can download it in Cortex format if you have Lab so you can use it as a modifier, or if you don’t have Lab you can install Coden and then download the spline object plugin (instructions here).
Documentation
The documentation is not as comprehensive as it could be. Some written documentation is available as well as a number of Youtube videos. The videos are not bad (except for the compression quality) but there’s a certain inconsistency in the things that are explained and the ones that are just skipped over. Also, there aren’t enough videos to really cover a significant amount of ground, but one can expect the video library to grow over time.
The videos that helped me the most are the ones that explain broader concepts rather than trying to achieve a very particular plugin. For example, the video of how to generate a segmented plane with user inputs is great as it also goes through explaining the theory behind it. Hopefully we’ll see more of these types of tutorials.
Conclusion
Lab is not what I would call an easy plugin to learn for a Max user without programming knowledge — especially with the documentation being on the somewhat light side. Once you do learn it however, it’s an incredibly powerful plugin tool can help you create a great variety of plugins. The fact that it’s multi-threaded also gives it a great advantage over Maxscript (though one obviously shouldn’t expect it to be a complete replacement, either).
It’s hard to recommend Lab to every Max artist at this time, but it clearly does have a lot of potential. Before Lab becomes a must-have plugin, though, I feel a number of things need to be fixed: the lack of documentation, some frustrating bugs which will hopefully be ironed out soon, the addition of more simplified general purpose nodes and the inclusion of some fairly important GUI controls that are currently missing.
It feels perhaps as if the software was released a little bit prematurely. One also can’t help but be disappointed that it doesn’t provide direct access to 3DS Max-specific information, and this is perhaps my biggest criticism regarding Lab. Despite these criticisms I expect it to grow over time into a great plugin and for the very technical artists out there who know programming, there’s a lot you can already accomplish with it. For the rest of us, I feel Lab still has some ways to go before it should be in every user’s toolset.
You can download a demo version of Lab to try it out for yourself. Checking out the videos on Ephere’s Youtube channel is another way of seeing if you think the plugin is right for you. Lastly, it should be mentioned that pricing is very fair at $295, allowing both freelancers and studios to purchase affordable licenses.
Torbjorn Olsson is an eclectic Swedish native who loves to do all things creative. He took every opportunity to fulfill his creative dreams after he got his first taste of 3D in his teenage years, and is currently working as a Cinematics Director at S2 Games. You can find more about his work at Tobbeo.net.
Related Links:
- Ephere Lab’s official page
- Lab quick intro video
- Lab overview video
- Lab video tutorials
- Lab online documentation
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Tags: Ephere Lab | Authoring tool | plugin development | plugin SDK
Nice review Tobbe. I had an impression that Lab was similar to ICE for Max. In the general sense yes, but it has to evolve more. The good thing about ICE is that is has lots of ready to use nodes that gives you the possibilities of create a lot of cool effects by joining stuff together.
Of course you can delve deeper with programming, but in general, with the provided nodes you can create some custom compound to do some cool things.
But I guess it’s a start. As it’s developed, it’ll improve.
Seems they arr following Softimage ICE
Thanks Tobbe! Good things to know.
I was a bit disappointed when you dropped the no spacewarp bomb, something I think many of us wish we could create on the fly, regardless still appears to a powerful and useful tool.
nice review Tobbe,
yes Ephere have a lot to do to fix all the errors, I was in the beta and I continue to try it, but because I’m also a Softimage and ICE user as well as genome I often find LAB frustrating, because a lot of functionnalities and usefull nodes are missing. And to be honest I almost never can finish a plugin Idea I started (which worked on ICE or sometimes in Genome), because of these problems. But the good things is that Marsel is nice and when I send error reports and have suggestions He always try to solve the problems I have. So I hope soon It’ll be really ready.
I really, really like this tool. Its surprisingly easy to write your own nodes in c#, for example when you need more complex stuff going. I usually let Lab handle input/output while custom nodes (that can be debugged in VS) does the hard work. And I agree that the ephere-guys are very helpful!