R Reynolds

Dang! I've used that technique before and I still didn't think of it for this case. Thanks for the reminder.

I'm building a formed steel frame, a part of which is shown below, to fit inside an archway . I wanted the vertical column to intersect nicely with the curved section, so I built the curved beam first and made a copy of it as a background template. After completing the orthogonal Tee section with all the corners and five pointers, the final step was splicing the Tee section into the curve and massaging it's cp's, mags and bias values so it's shape matches that of the original curve. My question is based on the fact that when you lathe a circle in A:M, no matter how many point

I can't say how long these options have been around but I noticed that Netrender has two checkboxes. Enable OpenMP for slaves Enable GPU processing for slaves Currently my CPU has four physical cores so I typically run three of them in Netrender and leave the fourth to run A:M. What would enabling OpenMP bring to the party? Windows 11's Trusted Platform Module spec. is giving me an excuse to replace my 11 year old hardware. What GPU specs. should I shop for to take advantage of GPU processing? Thanks.

That's an integral part of the outdoor sunshine light model invented by Yves Poissant. The yellow and -blue suns are both kliegs with identical properties other than their colours. The -blue is "translate to" and "orient like" constrained to the yellow with zero offsets. It's an easy way to give shadows a bluish tinge to simulate fill light from the surrounding sky. But as I'm describing it to you I realize that it's probably unnecessary in this case since I'm supplying the sky light with at least 40 kliegs.

Well my latest rolling stock release has taken more time than usual since the cargo required way more work than the railroad car. Before interstate highways and stackable containers, rail "intermodal" transportation was defined as driving transport trailers onto railroad flatcars to "piggy-back" their loads from city to city. Railroads started by towing the trailers up long ramps onto a slightly modified standard flatcar and anchoring the trailers with chains. Soon modified flatcars were given integral fold down ramps so multiple trailers could be driven onto a long series of co

Its almost entirely kliegs. The sunshine is my typical sun klieg plus negative blue sun klieg combo about four miles away to give the window frame shadows the right blur. Each semi-circular window gets "filled" with five overlapping kliegs that are just outside of the window frames, so forty in all. They're all greyish blue but I highlighted one set in white for illustration. Each klieg is about 360 in. in diameter and has a cone angle of 179.9 deg. I still have to play with number of rays and how they're distributed because you can see grey banding in each arch close to the windows.

I never think of that! Thanks again Robert you've been extremely helpful.

OK Robert while I have the tech ref open I can't find any reference to "Distribute in Passes". I assume it has something to do with how rays are cast from the area of the klieg? i.e. For every render pass, the rays come from different locations within the klieg area.

Check that! It's an advanced properties and I had neglected to throw that switch. Thanks Robert.

NIce catch! Under BIAS the tech ref says "scenes using very large sizes may experience math precision errors during rendering". So your observation sounds right. It also says "Visible: Sometimes" and in my case I can't see it. I assumed it would be under Cast Shadows but all I get are Type, Rays Cast, Distribute in Passes and Darkness. I'm not sure where else to look.

Sure! Now you tell me. 😄 I'll keep that in mind. Thanks.

I may have done something wrong but I couldn't get this to do what you expected. Oh I'm well familiar with Action Objects. When I first started building Pennsylvania Station in 2009 I ended up with a model that had 74 of them. I returned to that model recently and the first few screen renders were frustratingly slow in v19o & p. On a hunch/whim I decided to rebuild it as a single model importing all the parts that used to be action objects. As of today the model is 18Mb but renders are back to being typical. However finding patches and aligning normals during a sav

I have a model of double swinging doors with bones and poses that I want to import multiple times into a new model. After the import, I can select all the CP's and translate and rotate them into my desired positions but the bones stay anchored at their imported positions. Is there a way to move the entire model, bones and all, within a model? I'm fairly certain the answer is "No" but I thought I'd ask before doing the grunt work or installing them in the chor.

I'm curious as to what problem this new feature solves. This is well timed as I had just generated a render that had this very problem in v19o. v19p eliminates the really black patches. Thank you Steffen. But still remaining are the subtle light grey patches on either side of the arches on the right that were there in v19o. Both images were rendered using the attached project. Penn_station_black_patches_embed.prj

As you can see, it's all based on my favorite Enhance_AM combiner; AM_Dirt. My only problem with it is the way the blend percentages work. I had assumed that if you wanted an equal distribution of six evenly distributed grey levels (0, 51, 102, 153, 204, 255) then the blends should be five bands with the same limiting percentages. A look at a histogram of the resulting material showed this wasn't true. So after some trial and error I found the blends shown that produced a reasonably even histogram and I use these consistently with colour choices that are subtly different so they combine well t