The General Pros and Cons to Paint Effects?

[bflat]

Is paint effects something you've found to be useful in a real production environment? Or is it just gimmicky right now? How easy is it to achieve exactly what you want with it?

Besides those questions, what are the general advantages and disadvantages you've found to using it?

[gmask]

Pros: Really fast for what it does, Looks pretty good
Cons: Is a post process and is not calculated in reflections or refractions, difficult to make complex brushes

PaintFX is a very unique tool and is undoubtly fast for the density of inofrmation it creates but reuqirsalot fo wrok in integrate into raytraced scenes and has a few issues with compositing.

[positron]

I have found PFX to provide very useful solutions where other approaches would have been time-consuming or even impossible. Outside the obvious function of making a quick forest or garden if you need one...other things I've used it for is quick rain and snow, tentacles on a jellyfish, intestinal wall cilia, animated graffiti strokes, a walking pencil-sketch man (by attaching a pencil brush to curves on an IK setup),etc.. Also I've used the Canvas mode for quick texturing of objects and watercolor-y backgrounds.
The problem is that you really have to dig into it before you can do anything surprising. The ability to use your own texture maps is really powerful, and the built-in dynamics are super-fast, much more plug and play than the regular Dynamics tools. Painting on objects is a great way to spruce up a landscape scene.

Lots of uses. have fun..

[yen-valmar]

the big thing is just that you have to know how to composite if you want to use it for much of anything. same with fur, but fur seems to have a lot more problems not playing nice with other parts of maya. though of course fur and paintFX don't play nice with eachother as i have been finding out in my recent attempts there.. horrible horrible aliasing... compositing ahoy.....