ericsh6

Maybe you need to increase the diffuse and lower the ambient levels of the the hair emitter? I like to do a progressive render on the hair area only and then play with numbers till I get the look I want.

I can take it. But in 6 months from now when the movie is refined, the title may make more sense. I haven't seen Narnia yet but I am in awe of the trailers I have seen. It will be a big event when I go in a few days. I re-rendered part of my mountain scene with tree (hair) shadows turned on and with multipass off (a-buffer render). There seems to be some tree jitter in the center of the screen. This may be due to hair jump in netrender v12.0. I can feel in my bones that Hash will fix the hair jump and hair collision and cloth very soon. V12.0 netrender will be coolest thing around then. Link to mountain shadow re-render

The head turns get better tward the end of the movie as I get a better feel of choreography animation tools and start to observe how people move. I learned alot by making this movie but compared to much of the posts on this forum - I have painfully so much to learn. You are right - the trees are not casting shadows. I wanted the frames to render under 4 minutes per frame to finish the movie by December so I turned off shadows on all hair. It looks way better with shadows on. Thanks for the tip! I have backed up my entire project so I can rerender it with the suggestions I am getting. Speaking of hair, hair collision in netrender v12.0 doesn't work right - the hair sticks straight up and is stretched wildly. I am going to do a full re-render when they have that fixed. I will post the entire movie here in the next couple of days. I think I want to apply all the suggestions I get here to the movie, get Hash to fix hair collision in v12.0 or v13.0, rerender with full shadows on, and then submit it to A:M films.

Yes, please constructively critisize. That's why I want to post the whole movie. The movie is about a Kentucky girl and her 2 friends that are sent back to 1846 Utah by an Angel to experience the Mormon Trek for themselves.

"Chronicles of Zion" - Just click on the quicktime or windows media version I think my 4Mbyte file was too big to upload here so I put the link to a website that has a quicktime and windows media versions. I want to post the whole 14 minute movie but it has a few hair issues (you can see the pixely hair on the blond character near the end of the trailer) and I'm not sure if I should submit it to A:M films. Maybe someone has an idea of how I can make the whole movie available? By the way, the movie is done but I am open to suggestions on making better animations, renders, etc. Enjoy! (Hopefully)

I think it is a bug that needs to be reported. I use version 12.0 and I use tga with alpha channel created in Gimp to decal onto mountain terrains to create mountain wear and get the same thing except that I see swirls where there should be straight wear lines. I think bump maps are a good way to make creases and that it is worth getting this fixed in A:M. I wonder if it is Gimp though?

Everyone in my family laughed hard watching this animation - everyone except for my 5 year old who may have somehow related to the little boy character. Loved it - nice work!!

markeh, This 640x480 image took 13 minutes to render on a P4 3.2 GHz machine and I am used to about 4 minutes with 4 pass multipass. However, with this picture I turned on "cast shadows" on the hair and use zBuffer shadows on my klieg light which I think looks very good and I find that ABuffer render is faster than multipass and of course better quality. I will experiment with varying properties, add some 3D trees in the foreground, and animate a flyby and post when done.

Yes, I use the same tree image everywhere - I only have one hair material applied.

I must learn more about ABuffer. A good topic for some evening forum research.

Well, I must apologize in advance for the trees in the foreground but the ones in the back are looking good thanks to HASH. If someone knows how to make the trees in the foreground look better please let me know. I built a tree in A:M, rendered it to a 320x240 TGA file with alpha channel, cropped it in GIMP, and then added the image to hair and slapped it on the mountain. HASH has more work to do though because fog on hair doesn't work in multipass, and I need multipass to get descent render times for animations. Plus, I think there is some other weird render problems in V12 but I am still amazed at what can be done.