Eric2575

Ok, TGA's it is, but I'm still unclear on the rest. William, as stated above, I'm not savy when it comes to image resolution, resizing pics, etc. It would really be helpful if you could elaborate on your post. This is what I am doing right now: 1. Take a screen cap of the model part I want to decal in AM (wireframe) 2. Open the cap in Photoshop and crop the image to the model's extends 3. At first I tried painting the rivets at this resolution, but they were pixelated and blocky, so I figured I'll increase the image size. 4. Resize image to 10,000 pixel width - At that resolution, the rivets come out really nice. 5. Create a new layer over the resized image and paint in all the rivets. 6. Resize the image back down to apply the decal - now the decals look like crap. It must be completely obvious to a lot of you, see William Sutton, that I am not going about this the right way. Would someone please lay out the correct steps for this procedure, pretty please....with sugar on top.... You get the picture Thank you.

Well, I've jumped from making a decent looking decal of a rivet to a full rivet map. The problem was that in order to get the rivet decal to look as crisp as I wanted in the render, I upped the resolution at which I created the decal considerably. The model is 170' long on the horizontal, scaled 1:1 in AM. The decal map is the length of the model and several times it's height. All in all the map is 2.12MB. I tried resizing the map after I finished with all the rivet placement, but when I applied the resized map to the model, the rivets were noticeably degraded (see second pic). I'm no Photoshop wizard, so I may be doing something wrong. Here are the specs on the current size map: see pic Please help me, it took several days to make the rivet pattern map and I'd hate to lose all that work and AM seems ta have an issue with the size of the map. It gives a vague popup that says having trouble loading jpg to plugin??

Fog is great, but is a bit limited in it's options. What's the best way to fade a background from light to dark, but in a nonlinear fashion? I'm thinking maybe a rotoscope over the camera? A gradient material applied to a screen in the background? I tried both but haven't had real great results. See the pic for an example of what I would like to achieve. Edit: I basically made an alpha map in the shape of the pic and added it as a rotoscop to the camera. Looks promising. There are two options that I'm not sure about - "On Top" and "Include in Alpha Buffer". What do these options do?

Hah, anyone can go into a Catherdal and take a picture of some gemstones. I can see a reflection of you holding a camera in one of the gems. Seriously, I am speechless. Absolutely beautiful!!! You gonna let us know a few, no, lots more details on how you did that? Wireframe too please.

David, Nice work as always. Probably no need to mention this, but have you got your normals all facing the right way?

Sole survivor of nuclear fallout?

So this would be a targa image? Is the white saved as the Alpha Channel?

Pretty spline heavy on the top/bottom of bumper and center of grille. Shades of BMW. Post a shaded version.

Can you post an example of the decal please? When will Charles update the water tutorial? Two years ago he indicated it was in the works

There's always something good coming out of this post. Nice job. One impression - Biker's walk seems a bit heavy - maybe just me though. Love your work. Eric

I agree with you Dan. As a beginner, it's not wise to mess with the bias handles as they will affect the model in undesirable and unpredictable ways for a noobie (not meant to be derogatory.) I started tweaking bias handles early on in my AM venture and wasted a lot of time trying to fix and tweak the bias when in reality the tweaks were causing most of my problems. Stay with clean basic modeling and adjusting the magnitudes. Use bias when you've had a lot more experience under your belt.

I personally prefer a more sultry, seductive and intelligent pose instead of the semi spread leg pose. But hey, that's just me. As far as the modeling goes, to me it looks top notch. Oops, I think I may have just challenged myself to put my graphic pen where my mouth is.

A wireframe is a screen capture of your model when not in shaded view. It's the actual cp's and splines you have to create your model. Unless I am mistaken, R2D2 has blue color accents, not burgundy? Since you are pasting to Paint, you must not have any other graphics programs? Photoshop is a must have, but I suppose you can start with PaintShopPro or there may even be other programs that someone could recommend. I don't use Paint, so I don't know why you would get the blurring.

Really, really nice. I was kinda expecting R2D2 to be the droid, but the colors aren't right. When you say that your renders sometimes come out a little blurry, you might want to check if you have focal distance on/off. Turn it off for now just to have no roblems with these test renders. It maight also be that you are saving these renders at a low resolution, in which case that won't make any difference since the low res save will make any pic somewhat blurry. I would still love to see a wireframe. Keep it up.

John: You are amazing with the stuff you come up with on the fly.

How about a wireframe? As far as a different look for an in progress render, change your camera background color to black, do the same for your ground color, but add about 75% reflectivity to the ground. Now place your model about 10" off the ground (depends on scale) and place the camera at an angle that will capture the model and the reflection off the ground. That render will be all black with a nice view of the underside of your model.

This may not be too much help, but tweaking frame by frame most often worsens the problem and is almost impossible to do. I would seriously consider starting over and making sure you are careful about the steps you take.

Dan: I'm not sure if we are talking about the same thing or not, because as I stated in my previous post, the new fireplace model I made from scratch does not exhibit the anomalies, although I put the same 5 point patches in the same location with the same general shape. I didn't want to post another pic until I got a nice scene set up, but just to show you the flawless 5 point patch with 2 rays cast and shadows at 100%...

After several more experiments, I decided to recreate the basic fireplace from scratch. Keeping in mind basic , clean splinemanship, I came out with a model that does not display the anomalies in the 5 point patch region with 2 rays cast and 100% shadows. Having done that, it is obvious that the problem was one of my making and not one inherent to AM. Glad I did not report this before exhausting all the possibilites myself. Martin, hats off to you again for a fine product. I'll post a more complete finished render later. Thanks to everyone again for hanging in there with me and helping out. Eric

I got a crazy idea - why don't you post a wireframe and we'll comment on that if you like?

I did some more experiments. Putting a displacement map on a 5 point patch itself is not the problem, at least not that I have found. The artifacts in my model seem to be caused when I try to flatten the mesh, to get the displacement map to wrap smoothly around the corners. If I just apply the decal to the front of the fireplace, the 5 point patches render fine. Once I create an action to flatten the edges and sides, the 5 pointers seem to act up. Btw, let's stay on topic please.

Ok, the first renders, the one's that had the shadows turend off for the keylight, did not have the artifacts in the 5 point patches. The next renders with shadows "on" made the artifacts appear. To make sure, I played around with shadow intensity and rays cast, with no effect - the artifacts were still there in the renders. Only when I turned off "cast shadows" did the artifacts disappear. Gonna make sure I got this all straight and can reproduce it, then off to reports it goes. Geez, and the render with shadows was looking so promising. Ken, FPP's? Do you mean Normals? If so, yes, they are all facing out. If anyone has any suggestions as to why this may be happening, I'm all ears. I'll wait for 24 hours for suggestions to try and rectify this before I'll make a report. Update: I started a new prj file and made a few patches including a 5 pointer. Next I added the same displacement map as the fireplace and rendered with only the keylight turned on without shadows. That one rendered as expected, no problems. Next I turned shadows on, expecting artifacts in the 5 point region - no artifacts??? Hmmmm, so now I'm thinking there may be another problem with my fireplace model. So now I import the fireplace model into the same modeling window as my test patches and render side by side with shadows on. Guess what? The fireplace model shows artifacts and the test patches do not. Ergo, the fireplace model has more problems. Now to figure out what they are.

You probably already know this, but save the model files under V.12 and then under V.13 if you are going to play V.13, as they are not backward compatible at this time. Grosse klasse!!

Call me Hippe-Dee-Hop, cause I jump from one issue to the next. The render looks great, except...you tell me. Settings: Shadows - on Darkness - 100% Rays cast - 2 Intensity - 80% Multipass - 16x Soften - on Ok, you've already seen the problem. The areas the problems appear in are five point patches. Any ideas what's causing them? Were almost there guys, let's get this last little challenge out of the way.

Ok, did some more experiments. Dan, you were right about the shadows. The default setting is 80% which for whatever reason lets the light through the shield patches. When I set the shadows to 100% the inside of the fireplace was nice and black. The issue with the newly created lights not turning on in the renders was worked around by shutting of AM and restarting. This is an issue with AM V.13Alpha and is not really an issue for users with any other version of AM. As I am writing this, a render of the last test is running. Will post when done.