ypoissant

Most excellent texturing job Will. A very well balance between color and bump.

Matt, You have a way of making nice pictures with simple things.

Nice results. Very cool!

Because it is reflecting a white environment.

Just remember: AO is supposed to replace a skylight rig. Using both at the same time is useless and will only get you indecent render times.

In the Project Workspace (PWS) you can click a light in the model folder drag it over the choreography icon and drop it there. This will add a new instance of the light you selected to the scene and you just need to position and orient it to suit your project. You can also create a new light in the objects folder and dropt the new one the same way. Edit: Can't beat Rodney .

he really meant 1, right? there is no zero IOR in A:M. Oups. Right. 1.0. Not 0.0. I'll corect that post. Thanks.

If you placed your model in a choreography (or action) and you have your choreography (or action) window opened while you edit your model in the modeling window, then close the choreography or the action window and this should get back to normal.

Since an IOR of one does not make much sense in reality, it is considered a special case and handled differently in A:M to allow the user to add some special visual effects or to render transparent object in an illustrative style.

This is a very important advise. Technically, your decal resolution should be at least twice that of the closest final render. 4 decal pixels (2 high x 2 width) per final render pixel. "At least" meaning that you can have finer resolution for better results but try not going coarser resolution than 4 decal pixels per 1 rendered pixel.

Really nice. Did you use the "Soften" option in the Multipass options? If not, thry it. It should help with the aliasing effect on the utensils caused by the HDR environment.

If your goal is to achieve a look like your Photoshop composited image, then you should start tweaking the costume colors. Your red and blue colors seem too dark. Like Patrick, I think you should be able to achieve a similar look straight out of A:M.

As Stuart mentioned, "The main rule is: a patch consists of three or four CPs that aren't all part of the same spline." The corollary of that is "Any 4 CPs that are part of the same spline will not render as a patch even if it is a closed spline." One way to apply this rule is: - Select each of the 4 splines, in turn, that form the patch you want to delete. - For each of those splines. press the 'k' key to break the spline. - Build a new closed 4 CPs spline. Because this is one single spline with 4 CPs, it won't render as a patch. - Click-to select and Move each of the CPs, in turn, from the newly created closed spline, over each of the CPs where you broke the periphery splines and once the two CPs are over one another, click the right-mouse button to attach the two splines together. This is a little bit of surgery but you don't have to add a 5th spline.

Wow Matt! That is quite an exhaustive coverage of the topic. Well done.

Cool! You're using a Ambiant Occlusion technique that I wanted to document in a short tutorial. That is: placing occluders to mask ambiant occlusion and thus control the light and shadow directions. In your case I can see that you placed an occluder to the right which produces a darker shading on the right of your character. I thought I'd take this opportunity to mention this technique.

I've read the whole thread and here is my hypothesis: The use of the word "blurry" in your description was unfortunate. In rendering terms, it means very specific techniques. No matter how hard I would examine your renders (all of them) I could just not see any bluring (in its technical sense) in them. So I don't think your problem is one of technically bluring. I came to the conclusion that what you are refering to as bluring is actually just the lack in contrasts on the shading for the groves in the top portion of your furniture compared to the bottom portions. If that is your issue, then this is just normal. There are no problems there. You get better shading contrasts in the bottom portion of the furniture because your surface geometry details (the groves) are not all oriented along the y axis like it is in the top portion. Because you have light ( skylight) coming mostly from top and symetric around the y axis, you will get stronger shadows on groves oriented along the x or z axis but weak shadows on groves oriented along the y axis. If you want stronger shadows on your y axis oriented groves, you will have te devise tricks so that you get assymetric light coming from your skylight. You could place a patch, outside from the field of view, somewhere beside your furniture, to mask some part of the light that comes from the skylight. Or add another light in the scene to produce an assymetric lighting. From the casted shadows on the ground, I see that you are using z-buffer shadows. z-buffer shadows can miss small details (like the groves) in your models and produce wrong self-shadowing. You might want to increase the z-buffer shadow map resolution but if that still does not solve the shadowing issue, you will have to revert to ray-traced shadows. Be prepared for longer render times though. As a note, multipass rendering with fewer than 5 passes does not use softening, The multipass "Soften" option is only available if the number of passes is at least 5. So a multipass with 1 pass render cannot be blured unless you explicitly added a blur post effect.

That's a nice render. I like your attention to texturing details for the wall, the table border and the floor tiles. I think the wood textures on the molding and the coat-peg need more work though. More perturbations in the strates and also tighter strates on the peg. Also use different material position and orientation for the peg feets. You might want to take a look at this wood material tutorial for some ideas.

I must say that I completely agree with Dan about the overkill settings. I understand that just setting the properties to their maximum values and render during night is easier to do than testing different settings but I don't like the impression it gives that one need those outragous numbers and render times to get that sort of quality. One would normally use 100% sampling for AO only when heavy post-procesing is planed. And I mean heavy. Otherwise, the default setting should do the jub just as well. Nice animation BTW.

The room should be fully enclosed if possible. There is no reason to remove a wall in order to position the camera. Place the camera inside the room.

This scene really, really, really didn't require radiosity. You are spending all this radiosity render time for nothing. Because there is no environment to contribute radiosity on your chess board, it just looks like a normal raytraced render. That's why you had to compensate with additional lights in your scene. If you placed the chessboard in a room, on a table, then using radiosity would have substantially improve the scene but rendering a chessboard in the void, almost black environment like that is a good example of a use of radiosity that bring no gain and just longer render times.

Dan, I don't understand what you mean by "ambience color of an object to function with pigment subtraction". What are you trying to do?

On each object and/or each group of each object, you have "Ambiance Color" and "Ambiance Intensity" properties. If you do not set an explicit "Ambiance Color" but set the "Ambiance Intensity", then the ambiance color will be taken from the diffuse color.

Awesome. Bravo!

If you don't set an explicit surface ambiance color on the object or on groups, then the renderer will use the diffuse color as the ambiance color. So if you used a color map, and don't set an explicit surface ambiance color, the ambiance color details will be the same as the color map. That is true if you set an explicit surface ambiance color on the object or on a group but not true if you set the ambiance color in the Choreography "Global Ambiance" color. This global ambiance color acts like a light and thus will add its color to whatever diffuse color is there. Not override it.

You don't need projection map plugin. You can apply a decal in a spherical projection manner. Just load a sphere model. Right-click on the model and select "Add" -> "Decal" and then select your map. Right-click on the decal and select "Application Method" -> "Spherical". Then right-click again on the decal and select "Apply". Now you can set it as either a bump or displacement map.