robcat2075

You must be on an old OS if you are still able to run CD versions.

Yup, sounds like a video card issue. While you are still on v13 or v15 you should make sure you have that last version of those by getting the installers from the Hash ftp site.

I haven't noticed 5 seconds, but I notice that on-screen renders only persist until the next selection/deselection event. If an inadvertent click or keypress somewhere would cause something in the PWS to become selected or deselected, that event can be queued until the render is finished then process, causing the render to immediately disappear. I always prefer to us Shift-Q for a progressive render as that gives me a quicker sense of things like lighting without needing to finish every pixel. These can still be accidentally restarted by errant mouse clicks. Of course, a regular render to file will take no longer than a Q render and doesn't disappear like onscreen renders can.

Any idea what screen capture program can has the highest frame rate? Hypercam only goes up to 10 fps.

Could this thing be used like Google Hangouts but with screen drawing? Does it work on a program screen like A:M or just on "media" as they say. ... The Animation Collaborative (where Victor Navone has been teaching)... So Victor Navone is not at AnimationMentor anymore. How interesting. Geez, AnimationMentor spent a lot of money developing proprietary online tools like this and now anyone can get them off the shelf. I hope they got their startup loan paid off.

"Here's looking at ya!"

Good looking shot. CLoth can work for your banner or you can try the bones approach in this post

19 Those are clearly different views. Are you SURE everything is the same? Same viewport?

Great job, Mark!

It absolutely can be done. If you get stuck, come back and ask some more.

Something that helps warm up the character in the original image is the slight red blush added to the nose, cheeks and inside the ears. That is painted on, not a rendering effect.

Hooray for easy fixes!

If you can send me the PRJ with models embedded I could take a look at it. I'm sure there is a reason. You could send it to me in a private message in the forum.

Hmmm... is Use Settings from>Camera check in your Options>render panel?

I'll add that the white card trick is a real-life photographers technique for getting idealized images of glossy surfaces like cars. It isn't necessarily behind the camera, you put it wherever it gets you the highlights you want, that best reveal the shape of the object. Those giant box lights aren't cheap in the real world. $10,000 and up

The porcelain had a parameter but i don't think the numbers corresponded exactly with this one. 50% gets the smoothest patches in this scheme. This is an overhead view of a 4-spline dome...

Further comparison of Normal Weight settings

Surface Properties have two rarely noticed options: Average Normals, which when ON enables... Normal Weight 0% -100% This seems to control how the surface normal is interpolated from one spline to the next across a patch which affects shading and reflection results. Notice the difference in reflections and specular highlights in these three images. From left to right... Normal Weight 0%, 50 %, 100% OFF and 0% is the A:M default but ON and 50% is the result most like the intended spline shape and will give you smoothest results for most models.

Anything that has Surface properties. So, yes, you can do it in a group if you don't want to do it on the whole model.

Some spline lumpiness can be reduced (presuming there are no other problems) by setting Surface>Average Normals>ON and Normal Weight>50

Here are two PRJs and the render setting presets to use with them... TDAQTest02 NoAO.prj TDAQTestNoAO.pre TDAQTest03 WithAO.prj TDAQTestWithAO.pre In all of these there is a main kleig (Spot) light and a Fill Light. Only the kleig light has shadows. The "Key " light is off. There is a white card behind the camera to make the square reflection on the eggbot body. The card is set to 100% ambient , white The card is set to Cast Shadows OFF and Cast Occlusion OFF The ground is set to cast no reflections. The diffuse Falloff of the Ground is set to less than 100% to make it whiter, however it reduces the appearance of AO on the ground. Fog is used behind the eggbot to blank out the background. The intensity of the lights and shadows is set in the chor. They are different in each version. they should be but not always.

variation...

I'll note that one typically doesn't use both AO and SSAO at the same time. SSAO is a "fake" AO. It can look great and is fast but the parameters must be set very carefully for each scene. The default values are just there so that they are not all zero.

Here's a test with one z-buffered light and one fill light, no AO. 2 seconds Here is a similar setup but with AO. 1 minute 13 seconds.

This would have been a great thing to bring to Live Answer time. I think that lighting is probably very simple. Maybe one very large z-buffered light, maybe AO and maybe a large white card behind the camera to provide the squarish specular highlight on the plastic. I presume the image you show at the top is something the artist provided and not something you rendered in 3DSMax. If it was your render, you could just imitate the lighting in the 3DSMax "chor", right?