Eric2575

I'm working on a still, not an animation. I double checked, and there is no change over time in this still. All I am trying to do is render a semi realistic pine branch in a scene. Since I want to smooth the whole scene out, I'm initially using a 9x pass. The problem is the pine branch. There is obviously something going on that is causing this, I'm just not seeing what I'm doing wrong. Compare this to a TWO scene with a pine tree that has no blurring, but I bet it does have multipass? There is no motion blur or focal length change in the camera setting. Edit: After playing around with the hair material and not getting anywhere, I deleted it and created a new one without this problem.

Here's acouple of things you might check: 1) Check the normals of your model and make sure they are all pointing out. 2) Make sure you have continuous splines, not splines that end and then continue with another spline 3) Rework the splines around the eyes just a bit, so you don't have those splines dead end in the middle of the mesh.

Wow, there goes my theory about an older version of AM. I'm running V.15 right now with none of the problems you describe. Are you using Vista, XP, or Tiger? What kind of video card? Be shure to get the latest drivers for your video card. If you're running Vista, then there's your problem. I actually tried to run Vista for a while and got so frustrated with it that I went back to XP.

What version of AM are you using, and which operating system? I'm in the middle of a long render right now, so I can't verify anything, but it seems like some issues, like the bias issue, might be from an old version of AM or a corrupt installation. Since I don't use the orthogonal camera much, I'll have to wait until my render finishes to try that out, but I do remember having some problems in earlier versions of AM when inputting values in the PWS. I believe the problems went away after doing a complete wipe of AM, manually clearing the registry, then rebooting and reinstalling. There were some instructions on the forum on how to do this, but it was a long time ago.

I've noticed you've pretty much posted the same car in the Stills Showcase quite a while ago? http://www.hash.com/stills/displayimage.ph...cat=0&pos=2 Is this the same car or a new one? I thought I saw it before.

What Chris said. Nice explanation.

Excellent!!

You are falling into the same trap many noobs have gotten lost in - trying to run before being able to crawl. Judging from your questions and that wireframe, you have probably just started working with AM? It would be really helpful if you went through the excercises in the book before trying anything else. You can't be a mechanic if you don't even know what the tools look like.

Do you have a bounce light shining up from the floor? If not, then you should add one to simulate a little bit of light reflecting off the floor. I like the look.

The first thing you need to do is have a very good idea of what you want the scene to look like. Will it be used for animation or a still? If animation, you may want to concentrate more on the characters than on the background. If a still, then all is fair game. Back to the scene. The ocean will be a flat mesh big enough to fill the camera angles. Will the camera be looking out to sea, or looking from the ocean to the land and river flowing into the sea? You don't want to build too much extraneous scenery that you may not need. I would make the ocean mesh one model and the land another. The river will be modeled into the land. The surface of the river will be another mesh with a turbulence material added to it. If you want to go for a toon look, it would make things a lot easier since you seem to be pretty new to AM. Before I go any further, post a drawing or pic of how you envison the scene. If nothing else, make a small scetch with the ocean, the river and the camera angle. While you're at it, tell us more about the project and the story behind it.

After opening AM several times and then having to invoke the Task Manager to shut it down since it was not responding, I finally got it to open again. I immediately trimmed the fat out of the project and turned all realtime hair and particles not to show. On top of that, I saved all models in the project to one folder just in case. So far so good. Now I'm sitting in front of the monitor watching grass grow as I am waiting for this particle intensive scene to render with IBL and AO. Yes, I am a glutton for punishment

Thanks everyone, I'll try your suggestions if I can ever open my project again. Right now when I try to open it, it just sits there and laughs at me

I have a chor with lots of sprites and hair. When the sprites and hair are turned on to realtime shaded in the chor view, it's almost impossible to do anything because everything is slowed down to a crawl. As a matter of fact, if I forget to turn off the shaded view, save the chor and try to reopen AM with shaded hair and particles turned on, AM doesn't want to open at all, or it takes a very long time to do so. My problem is this: Since I can't work in the chor with realtime shaded turned on, I obviously turn that off. However, when I render, I want the hair and sprites to show, so I turn hair and particles to "ON". Once the render is complete, Hair and particles are still left "ON" in the chor. This is even when I started out with the chor hair shader turned off. Why are the render settings over riding the chor settings? Can this be turned off. I need to render the hair, but not have the hair realtime render on in the chor when the render is finished.

Just did a quick search and came up with this: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...2&hl=perlin One of many.

That's good, oceans are easy. You need to create a material with a Perlin turbulence property and then animate that over time if it's for an animation vs still. Do a search with key word water or ocean. The Babbage Patch tutorial is outdated but still useful. There are several good threads in the forum about this. Start your search from there.

Nancy: Geez, now you got me thinking about it!!! Ok, I'll try an experiment with your idea and see if it pans out. Good thing I'm keeping progressive renders of everything I try for comparisons. Will report later.

I have TSMII and have never been able to get it working right in XP. Did you get it to work right out of the box, or did you find some reference for it? I'm prolly just to dumber.

Maybe I'm having a hard time visualizing or understanding how this would be done? The sprites are similar to clouds, semitransparent and all over the place. Think of them as fog rolling over a landscape, passing around the base of a cliff, going from sunlight to shade to sunlight. Everything except the particles are reacting properly to the shaded areas in the scene. The particles remain the same intensity through out. The compositing is taking care of that though. Nancy: This is for a still - I shudder to think the render times with that many sprites for a 30 second clip

V.15 has the new liquid blobbies which V.14 does not have. Depending on the type of water you need, there are different ways to accomplish this. Give us more information about your scene, is it an ocean, is it a stream, a fountain, running water from a hose, etc.

Well, I was able to render out just the sprites to a TGA with an Alpha channel. It was a bit tricky getting everything set up just right for the render because the sprites are bouncing off different surfaces. The solution was to group those surfaces and set their properties to transparent. That way the sprites could still bounce, but the background would still be black. The resultant render locks pretty cool. I'll share after the image contest. A slight but correctable drawback is the fact that the usual leakage of the sprites now also rendered behind the transparent bounce surfaces. A couple of dabs with the PS eraser took care of that. Something quite annoying has been happening as I render these sprite intensive images. Since there are so many sprites in my scene, I usually have particles turned off as I am working on the chor. When I test render, I naturally want the particles turned on. The problem lies in the fact that after the render is done, the particles in my chor stay turned on. This in turn makes it almost impossible for me to continue working due to the slowdown. I would have thought that just because you turn on particles in the render, doesn't mean that it would also turn on particles in the chor after the render is finished. Is there a way to avoid having particles turned on by the render settings? Particles in render - Good! Particles in working chor - BAD!

Started this project with what software? You must have quite a bit of modeling experience? This is looking very good.

What kind of feedback are you looking for, aesthetic or technical? The face seems a bit spline heavy, especially since it doesn't seem to have a lot of creases. You also need to smooth out the face a bit more, especially around the cheeks.

Thinking it through, I believe the answer will be in compositing the scene. If I use semitransparent mesh to cast a shadow on the particels, the area behind the particles that already have shadow on them will also be affected by the screen and will get even darker, not desirable. I'd show you what I am doing, but it's Top Secret, the winning entry in this month's landscape contest

Is there a windshield? This is very nice indeed. Do you have some other work that we can take a look at? I may do a search later on that.

You guys are way too fast with the answers