markarjun

Hi John many thanks for taking the time to give your insight into this. In the past I’ve found SSS quite hard to set up and to understand so I truly appreciate having all the help with this topic. I haven't tried rendering multiple SSS groups, will let you know if i get similar problems. I was amazed it was a lot quicker to render than i had imagined it to be! I think the render time was another reason for me avoiding it altogether.

We don't have that. I have wondered if a compositing solution might work... You'd render three passes. One is your "high SSS" settings. The second is your "low SSS" settings. The third is a grayscale map that depicts high vs. low areas and you use that to composite the two SSS renders into one final image. It wouldn't be quite the same as the dedicated feature but might do well enough for character animation. But it wouldn't be a lot more manual work since you have to paint a control map either way. Yeah compositing passes in post makes the most amount of sense. Thats awesome many thanks!

Those models examples are great and a lot closer to what I was aiming for, I would also wish your friend a speedy recovery. I'm guessing there isn't a way to have a decal drive the effect of the sub surface scattering similar to hair, as in paint areas of the ears and nose and leave other parts less effected so its less uniform?

Hi Rob, many thanks for this, I was trying to use ever smaller values to try to exaggerate the SSS effect on the model little realising the opposite was needed. I also didn't factor the size of the object in relation to SSS values and its effectiveness, that does in hindsight make a lot of sense. Will continue to mess around with the values.

I’m trying to get to grips with Sub Surface Scattering, but at the moment I’m at a loss on how to get it to work properly. What I cant quite understand is that the sss effect seems evident in the modelling window when rendered out in final, however not all evident in the default choreography window. I’ve been using some of Yves Possaint’s sub surface scattering value examples and testing them out on basic primitives with no luck. I was told by Robcat that John Bigboote uses sss a lot, any help from anybody would be greatly appreciated.

Hi rob i cant seem to access the link.

Hi Rob I haven't created a model yet, I'm interested in how I might go to achieve it . I would be happy for each tread to follow along a path and no they don't need to have an exact linkage with its neighbour, just follow each other. Thank-you for responding.

Hi, is there a good tutorial on rigging tank treds? One that isn't material driven. I initially thought about assigning each tred to a circular path constraint, but when i tried to offset each tred to a desired position the motion path went crazy. Is there a better way?

what is that getting that you can't get from rendering in A:M? If I am working on a project in its entirety then of course animation master is my choice, the rendering is fast and decent and most of all i'm used to it. But if i'm working with others then I don’t often get a choice. the models are created by someone else and the rendering and composting is completed by someone else. While i do love the all in one nature of animation master, enabling people to bring in polygon assets easy and giving people more options to render in external programs would mean more people can experience and use animation master.

Hi Robcat, Rodney thanks for the advice! you're right i agree Renderman is a colossus to use. I use a lot of animation software but without doubt the best animation tools are those found in animation master. They're simple and straightforward everything works as you feel it should (far better than maya or blender in my view. unfortunately clients and co-workers are generally biased towards what software they prefer to use. In an ideal world i could import the polygon models that my client gives me (which makes my co-workers happy) and animate as it is in animation master( which makes me happy) without reworking it as a patch , then export it to a third party render software(which makes my clients and co-workers happy). I know the guys at soulcage have done something like this but I would love to rig a polygon model in animation master alongside my patch models..Dont hate me for it! That doesn’t mean that I don’t believe animation master is great at modelling or rendering, I think that if it allowed more people to interchange and use whatever worked for them even more people would realise how really great a program it is and use it more. Best of luck with the programming fae sounds promising!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27677712 Sounds great, is animation master easy to export to renderman? or would extra work be needed to export it to renderman. I know this is not a commercial license but it would be great to use it as another option.

Hi Robcat! Yes it seems to crash when I turn the SSAO on, and renders fine when I don't, which is frustrating because it looks great when it does work. By right clicking on start-up i can choose whether i want the nvidia or the on-board graphics card, if i choose the latter it will use the CPU based SSAO when rendering, this is slightly more stable but still crashes.

Hi all, I've been using screen space ambient occlusion and it keeps crashing on me. I have an Nvidia gt540m graphics card on my toshiba core i7 laptop. I try to use just the cpu to render the screen space ambient occlusion but it still fails. Any ideas or setting I might be able to use? Does anyone else have this issue?I have a deadline coming up, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Mark