DanCBradbury

Your guy has an amazing sense of balance, or a very low center of gravity. Anyway, what i'm trying to say is when one walks up a hill or a % grade their body is strait up. Your guy looks sort of wierd walking perpendicular to the dirt. still looks pretty good.

Here's one i did with some bricks. I love how the new Newton Physics doesnt allow geometry to go through eachother like the last one. Render time: 00:33:12 Bricks.mov

Well... i dont think that works. When you render only lines you dont get any of the color map data. Maybe i should just make him toon shaded. AO works great for that. I should probably make a black shape to go behind his eyes though, and change those bump maps into color maps. REALY!! i'll have to find an article about that... or maybe you can send one my way.

are you using AO to light her?

you keep on trying to add many many hours to my retro building arent you. Well, i dont even know what the inside looks like, as the designer has not even made any drawings of it at all. Probably the hardest part would be the dash.

From the sounds of it... you've never seen the show. WAIT A MINUTE!! You've never seen Futurama!? it was made by the same guy who did The Simpsons. you should realy check it out. does anyone know how to get bump maps to appear in tune mode?

that chipset thing is exactly what we were looking for. in fact... he's been asking for them for quite some time. I guess i should just go with it now.

Hey guys. I had some free time so i made bender. Took about an hour to model and render. Let me know what you guys think

very nice model. The key ring is what sells it, but that front bulb sort of brings it down.

Hm... i think i may go with that. NO HANDLES!! lol. The designer had wanted a no handels look. Keyless, open remote, and easier than heck for me to make. lol sorry oakchas... those are some pretty neat looking door handels though.

i dont know... those look kinda gawdy... and would take a real long time to make

are you updating those zip files with the images in them?

Very awesome render. My only problem is that your very nice looking rocks have no weight to them. I think they would just push the dam out of the way, not realy fly into the air. Cool water, and i love the effect.

lol... this is getting scary oakchas. Do you know the designer by any chance? everything you've suggested he has aswell. freaky well, here's the door handels we're going with. He had suggested the new mustang touch pad handels, but i think this looks much better.

I don't know about making an inside. That seems like it would take almost as long as the outside did. I keep thinking about door handles. Anyone got any good suggestions or ideas on what kind i should use? The ones i have now are sort of plain.

Here's the new retro. The doors are now elongated, and the car sides and door are bowed out to match the curve of the car.

I guess i was just thinking out loud, Yves. Sorry for taking over your thread Zaryin.

So there's no way, currantly, that allows the ambience color of an object to function with pigment subtraction without AO? Anyways, i cant seem to get a good noiseless render with AO+displacement, so i'll just stay with the abience map with only the skycolor chanels illuminated. It works pretty good. Render Times (VGA): with ambient occlusion 2:42 with ambience map, no AO 1:32

where's this setting? If you're talking about the abmient occlusion settings i kinda don't want to use it, because an ambience map is much faster to render. Was there another global ambiance color that you're talking about?

Hm... quite a bit of work you've done, but i already have this map, and so much more, though it doesnt have the underwater topography data. The full picture is 8192x4096 pixels. This is just a sample of central america.

1) The ambient map is gray scale, because A:M does not support a colored ambience map , or specular color map type, for that matter, which they should probably think about doing, maybe. Now if you're talking about the model's ambient color, that's 141, 171, and 241. The only problem with doing it this way is that the ambient color overrides the surface diffuse color and makes it what ever color the ambient color is in shadow areas. Another problem is that pigment color addition and subtraction don't work, because of this color override. For instance, if you have a red ambient color, and the ground is either blue or green, it will still be evenly lit red; however, if you want to spend a few more seconds on the ambience map you can use the diffuse color map of your terrain to generate a selection of only your skylight color areas, transfer that selection to your ambience map, inverse the selection, and lower the brightness all the way to darken the non skylight color areas' . Unless you're really picky, you shouldn't even have to worry about this. Regardless, using an abience map is much faster than the actual occlusion. 2) Real height maps are hard to come by; in fact, this was the only one i could find that was a true height map. Most of the ones that claim to be a height map are only photographs that someone has converted to grey scale. Thought you could be sly with me, aye!! Most of the images of topos that you will find are line elevation maps, which aren't very useful when trying to make mountains in A.M. 3) The artifacts in the picture are from the top-down view in the choreography window. When I view it with a camera, the artifacts show up as thousands of black dots that seem to blend, but it's incredibly noisy and dark, even at 100% quality on all occlusion settings. Just to show you what i was talking about with the dimming of non skylight color areas. I used the color selection tool in adobe photoshop on the deathvalley diffuse map, at a Fuzziness value of 200, to select all colors in range of my skylight color, made the selection, draged the selection over to my ambience map, inverted the selection, and then lowered the brightness all the way. I would keep an original of the first ambience map just in case you ever decide to change your sky color.

I finaly got a hold of some satallite photos... but aparently nasa didnt want to have it oriented the way i wanted!! darn you nasa!! lol i had to spend 15 minutes or so scewing, rotating, and resizing the photo to fit.

i believe there's a trial version of cs that you can download for pc. Anywho, Matt and I used the above abient occlusion render to create an abience map for the topography. The renders are very quick and you can adjust the otherwise occlusion color with the models ambience color. IT'S REAL NIFTY!! and did i mention fast?

Oh and you had asked about the artifacts i saw with ambient occlusion. When i render a displacement texture, using abient occlusion, with progressive render mode the results are perfect; however, when i render it for real, black horizontal and vertical lines and splotches destroy the image. I've adjusted the occlusion quality settings from lowest to highest and they still dont go away. The first picture is of a full progressive render; the second is that same progressive render with a tinny square fully rendered. You can see why i'm not to happy with the results.

After converting your height map to a normal, using 20 as the maxium height in the nvidia plug-in, you should only need 100% scaled normal maps. Overall your height map isnt very detailed at all, and normal maps will help a little, but not as much as say a real topo height map. Still, you have a pretty cool thing going here. Not realy sure what you're going to do with it tough. image: Death Valley California, USA <displacement, normal, displacement+normal>