robcat2075

That's a great opening scene! -Tar's shield is awfully small for such a large body. Maybe the shield could have some spring loaded extensions that pop out to make it bigger? -I don't think the ninja leader needs to say "Kill him!", that intention will be obvious in the action. If he does need to give a command, how about doing it in some language that is not english?

This is just experimental but you can try it. It's several very wide Kleig lights arranged in a dome over a central point. They are very wide so they overlap. When you use multipass they randomly jitter themselves in their width. With enough passes they start to approximate a continuous dome of light emitting light from every direction. Because they are all Z-buffered each pass is fairly short. It's like a spinning light rig but there's no spinning and and you don't need to mess with motion blur. If you adjust the properties of "Light1" in the model (Objects>OneLight>Bone1>Light1) you adjust all the lights in the array simultaneously. Generally, the smoother the surface of an object, the more passes needed to hide the stepping of the lights. The vine needs not many, the ground plane needs very many. The greater the "softness" setting of the light, the fewer passes needed for smooth shadows, but the less that small details will get good occlusion shadowing. This technique doesn't seem to work well with creating occlusion shadows around very small details, which is what the scene in the chor was testing. Dome_8_lights05_vine_small_details.prj

I changed the decal to white so we could see the AO effect on the leaves better. that was 121 passes in 7 min 42 sec

Here it is under one of my fake AO domes. 49 passes in 3 min 01 sec that's not perfect AO but it's plausible AO in a very fairly brief time. Perhaps one might use fake AO for the vines and perfect AO for the more architectural elements and combine the two.

Here's an AO only render. It does look different than straight lights. This took 9 minutes at 10% AO so that's 60x longer. I think that's the culprit. How do these vines need to animate?

I got this in 9 seconds in the default lighting. Alpha channel doesn't add significantly. Does AO even do anything with image hair? Does image hair really shadow itself?

hmmm... 9:09 at 30 fps would be 279 rather than 273 so 30fps isn't quite it either. that's almost 29.97 (NTSC) are you sure 25 is set in the properties of the project? This is separate from the Options window.

I'm not sure I understand the question... I think you want a rotoscope? Select the modeling window you want (front , back, whatever...) Drag an image from your images folder to the modeling window. Choose "rotoscope" in the dialog that comes up. It will also appear in the PWS under your model. Set the glove icon to off so you can't select it while you are drawing splines over it later.

It does seem long. I haven't done much with decaled hair, but Nancy has and I don't recall her mentioning 7 hour frames. How big is the decal for the leaf shape?

Why do you need multi pass for this hair?

I'm not sure I detect a difference. Is there a previous post where you went into that?

It was 16 hours before? Yes, that's better. You may have to actually show us what this looks like.

I recall that one! Not bad!

No, this is actually still the original animation but with the updated material substituted. I was thinking of doing that with two treads, but then I thought I should add some wheels inside first , and then I thought I should add a body and then... well, thinking about it was as far as I got.

If it's for a logo, is it just one still frame? You could paint something that looks like a reflective surface on top of it. If it has to be animated that will be harder.

for flames , I've had success with streaks. LOTS of VERY transparent streaks http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=308692 I'm not sure I have the PRJ file anymore but some explanatory details are in the last post. If your flame needs to be silver and reflective, that's very much not like a flame. Do you have a picture of what that looks like?

nice noggin.

Sun shadows are ray traced, that's all they can be. Only Kleig lights can be z-buffered, and if you put a Kleig light far enough away it's like a sun light. With light lists it's possible to have different lights for different models.

One trick I read in Jeremy Birn's book is to not use ray traced lights on hair. Are you using ray-traced lights?

Describe the situation that needs this a bit more.

Slight further refinement. After a bit of research I've found that tank treads usually have some sort of tooth on the inside so they can be engaged by the drive wheel. And you can see this animated (with no flickering) at my A:M tests gallery

Yes, the animation is a bit surrealistic, but... you're making a movie! I think about making a movie; you're actually doing it. I agree with Largento, the ghost stuff worked real well. I'll look forward to seeing the whole film when it's done. Hope I haven't seen any spoilers!

I don't recall the settings but here's the thread http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=304884 The settings will be quite particular for each situation. You'll have to play with it a bit.

yes it is possible...it is called dual hosting. I used to do it on a web server i had set up (many many moons ago). It can be a real pain to get it up and running, but it is possible. However, I don't see how you could get each network adapter to be assigned to an individual cpu within a multi cpu machine. Sounds like a hassle. I was just brainstorming and thinking that since you can get a USB network adapter for $4 now maybe that would get you that extra IP address or some other avenue of access. But it sounds impractical. That's interesting. I didn't' even know what a blade server was. But it seems like all the economical, high performance CPUs are multi core now ( or are they?) so you still have that apparent problem of not being able to use them all. Wouldn't you also have to have a Windows license for each "blade"?

Is it possible for a computer to have more than one IP address? If it had more than one network adapter?