robcat2075

Even Boris is looking good these days.

Here is another modern render of one of my old Animation Showdown animations. I added a school gymnasium set and rendered with radiosity. A birdseye view of the chor looks like this. The set is a completely enclosed box with two kleig lights in the ceiling... A conventional render with those two lights gets this... That is very severe. If I were going to use conventional lighting I would need add a number of fill lights in strategic places. Here is a radiosity render. The shadow areas are no longer pitch black and there is visible detail even where the lights do not directly shine. Overall, however, it is too dark for my taste. Increasing the Intensity of the lights so that the charcters were well illuminated caused teh brightest spots on the floor to become overbright and clip. Instead I applied a gamma correction to the radiosity render. I''m liking this much better... Unfortunately, the shadowing that was indistinct in the raw render is now ever weaker. To give that some more bite i rendered a pass with ScreenSpace Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)... ... and composited that by "multiplying" it with the Radiosity. I did that in After Effects but an A:M "composite Project" can do the same operation. This PNG alternates "before" and "after"... SSAO has no anti-aliasing so I had to render those at 3x3 times the normal resolution to make smooth versions suitable for compositing. When A:M introduced Radiosity our computers weren't ready for it. Each render took so long that animation was unthinkable. But now with a modern CPU and NetRender it is within reach. My 640x480 test renders for this scene took only about 3 minutes per frame. After i got my settings decided and cranked up the quality, the full-frame final renders took only about 20 minutes each. Get started with Radiosity with Yves Poissant's Cornell Box Tutorial Learn more at Yves Poissant's Radiosity/Photon Mapping Pages

Thanks, David! I'm finding out now that this must be a 19.5 problem. If I go render in v19.0 the frames come out properly. I should have thought of this before since i already had a 19.5 problem with the regular color render of this scene.

Here's a birdseye view of the chor. The alien in the camera view is highlighted, the offscreen aliens are to the right of the camera. But now I've gone through deleting each alien one-by-one, re-rendering that frame and the gash is still there...

Starting with the full chor plus a few additions, the gash is till there... But if I delete all the aliens, (there are about 9 offscreen to the right) the gash is gone, with a new, smaller scratch on the front-most cushion...

I just tried making a stripped-down version with only the brick wall... but that didn't produce the gash when I rendered. So there must be some point between all-the-of-other-objects and none-of-the-other-objects that creates the problem. I'll have to investigate further and report back. Thanks, none-the-less, David!

Strange blotches appear on occasional random frames of an SSAO render... If I render the same frame number plus 0.01 the mark will not appear...

Hi, Edward, I think you have to do it in the original material, rather than in the model. Just to be safe, delete the keyframe you have in the model.

Can you post a sample PRJ that has that mustache model in it

Take... a trip to live answers to your A:M questions at Live Answer Time at Noon CDT, Saturday April 20, 2024. Starship Enterprise helmsman George Takei was born on this day in 1937.

I put a bump map on this model to simulate some wrinkles on the top, but although both top patches have their normals facing out, one patch shows the inverse bump result of the other... Just to try it, I did RMB>Renumber CPs... That fixed it! Don't know why, don't know how, but that did fix it.

We can do that! Now with more leg... KiltWalk18b.mp4

That's how they do Southpark!

Today at Live Answer Time we tried all the wrong ways to put a skirt on someone, then we did it the right way... simcloth! KiltWalk18.mp4 @Roger

A modern render of my 20-years-ago Showdown entry, now with lighted dance floor!

BTW, Steffen's page documenting the settings in Transfer_AW can be found... http://www.sgross.com/plugins/plugin24/index.html

Look at this fabulously flexible result of rigging a face with the Transfer_AW plugin. Steve @Shelton modeled this great character (right) and then we pulled out a lo-res version (left) with just enough splines to cover the essential landmarks of the face. We rigged and CP-weighted that with some minimal bones for the jaw and lip corners and then used Transfer_AW to interpolate that lo-res rig to the hi-res mesh. It would need some further fine-tuning but this is a huge time saver for rigging a face. TAW Hans.mp4

As I dimly understand it... Z-buffered lighting works by rendering a depth map from the viewpoint of the light. Every pixel of that map is really a number that is the distance from the light to the surface point that pixel lands on. then when the real camera image is being rendered, every pixel is checked to see if the surface point it lands on is farther from the light than that same surface point is in the depth map. If it is farther, then that means some other surface is in front of it from the light's point of view and it must be in shadow and should not get the light's intensity added to it's surface color. Apparently this is usually faster than computing an actual ray form teh camera to the light. So why can't this process accommodate the Boolean cutter? I dont' know, but it doesn't.

A modern render of this Showdown entry, now with lighting, atmosphere and sound...

A forum member has posed this problem... LightSource.prj That is the correct behavior. Only ray-traced lights can accurately account for the shadowing created by boolean cutters. So, with the box as a boolean cutter, the sphere is completely "cut" and casts no shadow from the ray-traced light. The z-buffered light can not handle that complex situation, so even though the box cuts the sphere from the camera's view, the z-buffered light still sees it and a shadow is cast. Interesting way to get a shadow-only pass! I shall remember that!

That is some hard-core tattooing.

Here is the full program that puts him in context. Yup, he still screams a lot.

Thanks, Roger and Gerald! I hope I can be helpful for a while longer!

Beautiful, Myron! Thanks!

You don't really need to download a new install if you already had A:M installed. delete the expired master0.lic file from the AM folder of your expired AM, then run it and it will prompt you for your new key