["Rendering patches" where none exist]

Hi - I have had a similar yet slightly different experience (10.5o PC) - I was rendering a very simple scene Choreography (camera, ground, 1 simple model, standard lighting) - took 23 secs rendering patches (regardless of render settings) - That seemed overly excessive for the model, so I started eliminating geometry from the simple model - went to 28 secs, eliminated more - 30 secs, kept eliminating, stayed constant around 26-29 secs. even eliminated decals, bumps etc - same stuff - then finally eliminated decals that were not being used - went down to 15 secs. Hmmm. So I closed AM, started fresh - same scene - noted that there were 2 rotos for the camera that were set to not be visible, deleted them - rendered patches with all geometry, decals, etc visible - 1 second ! HUH?

 

I guess the solution might be to close down & restart AM. I just retryed the scene to see if adding 2 rotos and making them not visible did anything to the time. Nope. Time was still around 1-3 secs for rendering patches. So I really still don't know what the problem was.

[Children's book illustration]

Hi - oh yes - I like like it alot also - very cute - love the background, love the models, color scheme

 

some suggestions, composition wise:

the far tree is confusing, appears to be part of the front tree - maybe move it a bit? to break illusion, or change color to darker?, or change camera angle some?. separate the bug a bit more from the background, his silohouette(sp?) gets a bit lost. perhaps add some more foreground interest, or items on tall hill (smaller plants, bugs,)- for some side activities extraneous to the story...

 

"hot spot on mushroom" is a bit shiny, maybe tone down the specularity?

 

As I said very cute..thanks for posting - Nancy

[tga to mov or avi]

Yes putting together tgas can be done with after effects (easily) but AE is not free, I also think you can do it with premiere (maybe not as easily), also not free. Nancy

[Decals don't work, only show white boxes]

Hi - I have experienced the same problem - and yes it took up a lot of my time in order to figure out a work around - However, I found that if I went into directx mode the decal would show up - then I could position & apply, save my model & then go back into opengl... unfortunately the switching back & forth would sometimes cause crashes - so be sure to save...hope this helps

[Render Window Issues]

Hi - Sorry I won't be able to help you, but you definitely saved me from thinking it was "my antiquated system", and from thinking that upgrading to a more powerful, more current windows system was the only solution. I experience very similar problems as you do (ver 10.5o, using opengl or directx), in that nothing shows up in my rendering window until I actually click in the render window (occurs 100% of time). Additionally, my system has semi-frequently hung during rendering (ctrl alt del doesn't even work). I can not figure out what sequence of events causes it, so obviously not repeatable - otherwise would have reported it. My poor old system doesn't look anything like your newer system: PIII 800mhz, windows 98se, 768 mbytes RAm, nvidia (something something) 32megs with most recent nvidia drivers, & most current version of directx9. I just recently switched from 8.5p - in which this never happened, and thought it was perhaps my inept fumbling with the more complicated user interface of ver 10.5...so perhaps it ain't us only? I too don't know where to begin to look...