itsjustme

We have coverage for the structure, not the contents.

Makes sense. Now I'm in sort of an insurance and contractor limbo. I'm waiting for some things to get resolved before I can get anything done.

She's looking great, Steve! I could be wrong, but the arms seem like they might be a little short...could just be my eyes though.

Looks great, Tore!

Happy Birthday, Charles Babbage (DrPhibes)!

Happy Birthday, Sebastian (thefreshestever)!

Happy Birthday, Steffen!

We're alive...almost didn't make it. The data was almost all I was able to salvage...pretty much a total loss to the contents of the house. Thanks for the positive energy everyone.

Happy Birthday to all you guys!

I'm going to have to limit my computer activities for a little while...lost all of our computers (and most of the house) in the flooding that hit the Austin area on Thursday. It was very bad...I'll spare you the details. Once I can get another computer, I'll transfer my licenses and get back to work (I don't know how long that will take, but I'm hoping within a month). I lost about a day's worth of work that is easily fixed once I get back to it, so I'm very happy about that. I love USB drives (three pen drives held everything)! Once they dried out, everything was fine.

Here's the next version. I doubled the number of kliegs to make bounce lights at one inch off the floor (I wanted the bounces to match the visible lights) set for only diffuse lighting. I put color on the ceiling frame and ceiling tiles (a little less than absolute white) and removed the Ambiance applied to them previously. There is a smattering of texturing started...along with some materials that need to be fixed, so don't think those are rendering errors. I increased the passes to 36, so with that and the added lights the render took two hours and fifty-four minutes.

I think a lack of 64bit Codecs is the problem with AVI...you can render an AVI without compression in the 64bit version and it should be fine. For Quicktime, I think it's pretty much the same type of thing (no 64bit encoding provided by Apple). You can use the 32bit version to render either AVI's or Quicktime using compression. I generally render to TGA's and use something like Virtualdub or Quicktime Pro to make them a video file. Hope that helps, Tom.

Thanks for the visuals, Nancy! The comparison helps. I will probably do some messing with the non-shadow light Robert suggested. Thanks, Robert!

Beautiful work, Rodger!

Each one will be in the neighborhood of one to two minutes long...the first one will be closer to one minute, I'm thinking. Hmmm, I'm using a Huey to calibrate my monitor....maybe I need to check that. At the moment, the ceiling is dark, but not completely black on my monitor. Is it completely black for everyone?

I just posted a second attempt at lighting the Break Room here. I've got three other experiments in the works as well.

I think this lighting is better...it's just a single klieg light for each light fixture (set slightly under each fixture with 179.99 degree cone) with the ambiance of the ceiling tiles at 7% (it could be better and will probably get more tweaking) and 98 percent on the light fixtures. I added some color to most of the groups to try a color scheme...I was trying for something that wouldn't distract from the characters too much. I still have to texture everything, this is sort of a "ballpark" as a starting point. The render took about an hour at 16-pass multipass (although I was doing other things on the computer while it rendered)...the final product will probably use more passes.

I used eight bulb lights for each light fixture (so, a lot of lights), the lights are set to cast five rays for the shadows, which also jacks up the render time and the light fixtures and ceiling are brightened up with about a 95% and 45% setting on their "Ambiance" respectively. The render time was pretty crazy (about ten hours at 1080 HD size), but that will come down a lot as I go along. The render times for the room don't concern me very much since I'll be rendering angles once then compositing in characters, etc. I'll have to look at my reference images, but I'm pretty sure the ceiling is too bright and I think using a single klieg for each light fixture will come out better. I think that will give a more realistic look to the lighting. I was trying to make sure there was a flair of light on the ceiling around each fixture when I did this setup, but I'm thinking that wouldn't really be there...I need to check. It was a first attempt, things should get better. I tend to learn by pulling every lever and pushing every button.

I made an attempt at lighting the Break Room and posted an image here.

Okay, my first attempt at lighting the Break Room. I'll have to do some assessing...and some tweaking.

Happy Birthday, Bruce!

Which GPU are you too using? Are the drivers up to date? See you *Fuchur* Here's what I'm running (mine works in v17): Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Service Pack 1 Processor: AMD A8-4500M APU with Radeon HD Graphics System Memory: 16GB Adapter: AMD Radeon HD 7730M Current Resolution: 1920x1080 Refresh rate: 60 Version: 8.942.1.0 (2/24/2012) Adapter: AMD Radeon HD 7640G Version: 8.942.1.0 (2/24/2012) Graphics memory: 6,133MB Aero status: Disabled

Shaded wireframe in v17 appears to work for me.

LOL! Fantastic work, Sebastian!

Happy Birthday, Jirard!