robcat2075

When you tried Dan's decal, did you set the type to "Normal"? I think if we made a bump material with a noise combiner we could get the waves effect that Dan showed you and also be able to have it move for animated shots.

It's a bit still but it does look more watery!

Update of flame simulation i did long ago, but I can't find the old long ago thread!

Do you have a treatment planned for the water?

Makes me want to visit!

Too bad there's no animation potential in woodpeckers.

If you want to decrease the fog effect, you can increase the End distance. The fog accumulates from zero at the Start distance to 100% total fog at the End distance. Increasing the End distance will make it accumulate over a longer distance and reduce the effect. Here is another thing to try. Drop this Sky Dome into your chor and scale it to reach past the back edge of your scene. This has a gradient to make sky look less flat. Sky Dome.mdl

Wow! This just gets bigger and bigger! Lets try the fog again. Go to menu Tools>Options>Rendering and make sure that "Use Settings from " is set to "This Dialog" (If "the Camera" were chosen then you would need to make all these render setting we have been making in the properties for the camera. That is valid, but since we haven't been doing that, we'll stick with "This Dialog") Then when you go to render, set Fog ON and set the Fog Start distance to 800cm and the End distance to 5000cm and lets see what comes out.

That's looking sunnier! How far back on Z does your model go?

Next... in the properties for that sun light again... Set Width to 0cm A Width greater than zero makes shadows fade out as they get longer, to appear less severe, but you don't need that with AO. Set Options>Cast Shadows>Darkness to 100% A Darkness of less than 100% adds some light to shadows to make them less severe, but you don't need that when AO is adding light. You can rotate your Sun light to any angle to get shadows in any direction. Since it casts infinitely parallel rays, its placement doesn't matter, only its angle.

Make a mental note to look into the dual-boot option so you can preserve an OS that runs all the apps you need.

It's good that you can revert, at least for now.

There should be some visible cast shadows and I don't see any. Are you sure that in the properties of that light you have Options>Cast Shadows>ON?

That must be a different picture, now it has some shadows! Try the Key light instead. If you look up in the Objects folder and look in the properties for the light that is named "Key" you will see that it is set to Type "Sun". That is why i call it a Sun light.; Sun lights cast parallel rays like the Sun does and light the entire scene, like the Sun does. Make sure to turn on its Options>Cast Shadows property. It is not on by default. You can vary the ratio of intensity between your Ambient Intensity and the Sun Intensity for different looks. For now try to have the two of them add up to about 100.

Are you sure you have the sun on and shadows on? We should be seeing clear shadows from the sun light.

Also, notice how good that looks with just 10% sampling. For a lot of cases it doesn't need to be any higher.

It looks more grounded! Maybe one end of the bridge is still in the air.

For a daylight effect you could turn your sun light back on, with a slightly yellow color and with about 40% intensity. Then reduce the Global Ambience Intensity to about 70% intensity and set the Global Ambiance Color to slightly blue.

that looks good!

For now, turn fog OFF and see what you get.

There will not be a patch for v18 since Hash is on v19 now. Steffen noted in the v19 release notes a while ago... That said, I don't know for certain that your menu problem is due to the OS update. I'm afraid we are nearing the end for A:M on the Mac since Apple will be dropping support for 32-bit programs next year. 🙁 That is what the warning you got refers to. Making your Mac dual boot and keeping the OS that A:M can run on is your likely only solution for continuing to run A:M other than moving to a PC.

To make your first AO render.. In the Chor properties, set Global Ambiance Type to "Global Color", Set Ambiance Intensity to 100%, Set Ambiance Occlusion to 100% In your Chor, set all your lights to Active OFF When you go to Render set Ambiance Occlusion to ON, Set Occlusion Sampling to 10% It is not required to use Multi-pass for AO, but for simple tests it will be faster. Set Multipass ON, set Passes to 4 "Fog" is very optional. Set Fog ON Set the Start distance to whatever the distance between your camera and the front edge of your set is Set the End distance to whatever the distance from your camera to some point just past the back edge of your set is. The color of your fog will be whatever the camera background color is. For now, leave that at the default. Fog makes this effect, where distant objects are dimmed and colored by the air... There are many possible variations of these settings, including mixing in regular lights, but this will get you started.

I bet it would look very impressive with an AO render and some fog.

Wow! that is elaborate!

Welcome to the forum! Yes. Each computer that runs A:M needs its own license.