cookey

Switching the object render mode to "hidden" hides the object in the choreography window display, but it still appears when you render the scene. Messing around with surface properties of a model I noticed that if you set the transparency to 100% and the density to 1% or less (not 0 tho) the model doesn't appear but still casts its shadow. Unfortunately this only works with Z-Buffered Shadows. Might be a useful trick for other people out there tho. I've managed to hide my cookie cut shadow casting patches inside the foliage of the trees for the time been. They are hardly visible but still cast an approximate shadow in my scene. My project is a graveyard with a landscape, trees, grass and gravestones etc. I want to render my scene out as an animation and the render time was impractically long. Each frame would have taken about 30mins and a 1000 frame animation would take 20 days to render. Thanks for the help. I will have to perhaps have a re-think on how I light the scene maybe to get that hair particle system (foliage) to render faster with shadows.

Does anyone know if you can make a model cast a shadow without the model itself rendering in the scene. I have some trees that have foliage made out of hairs. Takes forever to render with the shadow option on. I was going to fake the shadow of the tree by decaling a single patch with an image of the tree as a cookie cut, then placing it correctly in the scene so that it casts an approximate shadow of the real tree. The trouble is the cookie cut patch renders in the scene as well and I can't see anyway of making it none renderable whilst still casting a shadow. If I place the cookie cut out of the view of the camera then I can't get the shadow position correct. I've tried using Z-Buffered lights to create my shadows which are much faster, but they produce inaccurate shadows on other objects in my scene. A set of iron gates for instance gets a shadow that looks completely wrong. If anybody has any ideas on this or how to speed up rendering when using raytraced lights and hair with shadows then I would be grateful

I created a landscape using the terrain wizard and wanted to populate it with flowers. I decided to use the crowd flock and tested it with 16patch spheres 1st from the primitives library. I did a quick test render and sure enough there were the spheres floating just above my landscape. I then used the "flock to surface constraint" to constrain the spheres to the landscape surface. Sure enough, after scrolling through the frames a bit, the spheres moved onto the surface in my choreography window. When I did a test render, much to my confusion, some horrible great big black shadow things had appeared on the landscape, as though some massive thing was casting a shadow. I've only got one light in the cho, just a simple bulb and it does the same thing in all the versions I have (13,14,15). As soon as I remove the flock to surface constaint the rogue shadows vanish. If anyone knows what is causing this and how to fix it then I would be most grateful. I've attached two images, one showing the scene without the constaint and the other with it. Cheers. Also it seems that the objects in the crowd do not cast shadows onto other non flock objects, is there a setting somewhere to make flocks cast shadows?

Thanks for your help anyway. I will use v13 for the time being until I can save up enough pennies to buy a newer version at some point. Cheers....Cookey

In v13 I get the results as shown in your jpg pics. In v14 I get no turbulence. In v15beta I get the turbulence as shown in your jpg. I could use v15beta but it keeps timing out saying "trial period expired" and I have to keep re-installing it to make it work again with the timelock.exe file. The pics below show my results in v13,14 and 15beta. The same procedure was used to add the dust in all 3 versions (i.e right click/add new volumetric/dust). I guess there must be a bug in v14. Result in v13 Result in v14 Result in v15beta I've attached the images as well just in case they dont show up here. Many thanks ....Cookey

Can anyone help me to get the turbulence working on volumetric effects in v14.0c? If I drop a default dust volumetric into the choreography I just get a misty white sphere with no turbulence. If I do the same in version v13t then I get turbulence within the volumetric sphere. I saved out the project in v13 (with working turbulence) and then loaded into v14 and when I rendered the chor there was still no turbulence on the dust, just the same white misty sphere. I've tried re-installing version v14.0c but this makes no difference. I've also tried adding different turbulence types to the dust object but nothing seems to work. Help please anyone... Thanks ..Cookey

I've created an action from a BVH motion capture file and tailored it to work well with the Gala female model from the A:M library. The animation looks fine in the action window and also looks right if I apply it to the Gala model in the Choreography on frame 0. If however I move the action to start on frame 100 in the choreography it no longer works correctly. The model slides all over the place and all of the translations and rotations seem wrong. The further the action is away from frame 0 in the choreography the worse the effect is. I want to be able to apply more than 1 Mocap derived action to the model within the choreograpy, the 1st action will work fine on frame 0, but any subsequent actions added at later frame positions won't work correctly. I might be missing something obvious but I can't see any way of fixing it at the moment.. If anybody has any ideas as to what is going on it would be a big help. I'm using version 14.0a of Animation Master. Also does anybody have any links to A:M motion caputre turorials (other than the Zandoria Studios one).