robcat2075

Will is on the right track. Here's some official detailed explanation of the things in the mtl format Alias/WaveFront Material (.mtl) File Format the Google has numerous other leads

The wiki wasn't an official Hash thing, it was on someone's site, right?

Welcome to the forum! There aren't exporters in A:M for those formats but OBJ export can do the mesh (and textures in the current version of A:M). I'd be very surprised if Blender can not import an OBJ. I think exporting to .X format will also include rigging. A:M users use that quite a bit for exporting game assets. You might inquire if Blender can import .X files. To use any export plugin, Right-click in the model window>Plugins>Export>choose format

The import worked but I notice there's a transparent gap where the two sides of the map meet. Was that in the original?

v16 has an updated OBJ plugin, have you tried that?

Have a good day, Mark and thanks for all your problem solving!

I made my disks by squashing a sphere, but I think mine are too skinny. lozenges0C.prj

the reflections could still stand to be darker but I think this is very much in the neighborhood...

wait I think i got the reflection problem solved. How about this, Matt? This is closer to the appearance of the disks in the sample image...

also... use the "Glossy" specular plugin shader for the little spec of highlight that is on the lower left edge of the lozenges. I made a brief test and the initial problem i had was getting the reflection of the underside of a lozenge to be dark rather than show a reflection of the bright topside of other lozenges. sudden thought... there might be some application for that new reflection shader in solving that.

Hay, matt... part of the glass look in the image is a using a gradient for the reflection value. Surfaces seen more flat to the camera will have less reflectance and surfaces seen on edge will have more. Try that.

btw, I noticed that ray traced lights and z-buffered lights give somewhat different results with caustics. The very curious will want to experiment.

The edge detail is important too. if I turn up the refraction that adds some. I'm not a lighting person. Do not regard me as the last word on what is possible.

I think the edges being darker than the faces has something to do with it. that's something I'd try to pursue if I were going to pursue it.

It will be out of the water enough to see the rudder? Not that being complete is bad.

This is interesting, however, in the Shaggy case I showed above, he doesn't have porcelain on him. My main suspect remains CPs weighted to more than one bone.

Looks like the same problem. It's elusive. It's even harder to make happen twice.

I hereby declare this... pretty close. Aside from the off-screen reflection items mentioned above ( I think that's a lightsaber showing in the yellow block), the shadows are still a bit too bright and the blocks need a smoother transition from the faces to the bevels. Those are doable but I'll let others pursue that. However, I think this shows we can do those sort of renders with A:M. I added some bump to the surface; that can be turned off easily in the material. 256 passes with a denser, less pointy light path, 5.5 hours: CurvedGlass11h_denser_path.prj render preset: CurvedGlassTest.pre Reminder: when doing caustics scenes do a Q render before trying a Shift-Q (progressive) render. Then you can often try some minor parameter tweaking while a progressive render is running. If you make any major changes to your scene, save it then reload it to completely reset A:M's awareness of what's in it. Yes I think the original image was carefully stage managed and manufactured and not the result of just a few minutes of work.

Looking at the original image some more, part of that "look" is that there's a bunch of detailed crap off-camera that's being reflected in the plastic pieces. It's not just the refraction artifacts that we are seeing. We'd have to know what that is better to get all that little detail.

This one is too bright, but you can see telltale signs of the zigzag pattern the light is on in the "teeth" at the edge of the blue shadow.

Clever! That's a situation the FakeAO may be useful in.

The challenge of this simulated area light thing is making a path for the light to traverse that somehow evenly distributes the light within the shape. of course that's not truly possible with a "path". The more passes you have in your multipass render the more accurately the light is describing the line and not randomness. The more instances there are of the light moving in a straight line, the more obvious the stepping is in the shadows. Any math whizzes know how to truly randomize points within an arbitrary shape?

How did you get the ceiling in there?

I'm still pondering how to fit 101 things into 4 lessons, so this won't appear immediately, but I'll ponder more seriously now since there's interest. This will be completely separate from the old animation boot camp.

no, no need for feathers then.