robinsn

That makes sense to save on render time. No, didn't restart my computer, but did restart AM. I bet it was a combination of turning ALPHA off (I found several places to do that) and reloading the project. Oh, there was also a mysterious "no name" object/property/whatever under one of the models which I deleted.

Wow, thanks for the great step by step. I will give those a try. There is sure a lot to learn!! So when you're doing layers, such as in your example above, and you wanted Thom in front of the text, but the text moved to be in front of Thom in the same scene, then you couldn't use layers. Is that correct? I'm assuming that with the layers, layer one is always on top of layer two and 3 on top of 2, etc. So, if you have Thom walking through a room, anything behind him can be one layer, he can be a layer, and anything in front of him can be another. Right? So is the main advantage that you can debug and render separately so it's faster to render? BTW, somehow in messing around with alpha settings of different objects and perhaps other unknown settings, it started rendering correctly. Unfortunately I don't know what fixed it. OTOH, I have a model that works and I can compare to other models when they don't work and figure it out. Thanks for everyone's help.

Thanks for the ideas. I turned Alpha off and it made no difference. I tried playing with alpha on the objects and the chore and nothing made a difference. RE: Rendering out in layers, etc, etc... Sounds good, but I don't have a clue how I would do that. (that's why I was looking for a good tutorial!) To me it looks like the render is coming half from the camera and half from the prospective of the front view (2 key). If I do the quick render, it renders perfectly also. I just can't get it to render to a file correctly. Any other ideas? Randy

Thanks, Gerry. Those wannabe tutorials look like they could be great (just looked at a couple so far). I'll check them out further when I'm back on my video tasks.

Thanks bighop. From what I can tell, they're out of it too. I'm not even sure it's worth finding, but what I'm looking for is just help getting some video integration done. For instance, to try to get the basic concepts down, I used a photo as a rotoscope, created models for the 2 people in the photo, put a title behind them and had the title go up and over and in front of them and past the camera. Should be fairly simple. Probably is. But I've had nothing but trouble. First, I couldn't make the models of the people accept the projection, block the title while they're behind the people, and not show up with shadows and mysterious black spots. I finally got that all working through trial and error, but it just WILL NOT render correctly. It LOOKS like it's rendering correctly, but it's not. Chore looks like this: Render Preview shows this as it renders (which is correct) but the mov file it creates is all black: The render to file shows and creates this: I don't know why the preview would look right, but it won't render correctly. And it's been a struggle getting this far, so, I thought I needed to start from square one and learn from the CD - but alas, can't find it! Any ideas on the rendering problems above? I should separate that into a new thread, I imagine, huh? Randy

Thanks for the response. I will try to contact them. I didn't see that when I was running around their site, so thanks! As far as asking questions here, I know we get good answers to questions here, but I know so little about it, I wouldn't even know the questions to ask hardly. I used AM a while back, was getting somewhat proficient at it, and then upgraded to Tiger, and nothing worked anymore, so I stopped. I just now got the subscription and getting back into it, but it's almost as if I'm starting from scratch. I forgot how to do pretty much everything - or maybe everything changed? ;-)

I'm trying to learn how to mix animation with live action video and I'm having a hard time learning. I've seen a few tutorials but they aren't complete enough as I'm too inexperienced to pick up on how to do the directions. This CD is referred to often, but it always points to pluginz.com and apparently they don't have it anymore. Does anyone have any idea how I can get one, or the replacement if there is one? Thanks.