Ursa Magika

[Wildsided]

Now the book is out I need to promote it and for Christmas I wanted to make some festive artwork to post on social media. Naturally the first thing that comes to mind is Santa Claus, but then it dawned on me that Santa and for that matter Christmas, wouldn't exist in Bernie's world. So I needed to create a holiday and its mascot to fill the roll. Anyway long story that you're probably not interested in short. I created a Santa-esque character called Ursa Magika. He isn't textured yet and the colours aren't final but I figured I'd post what I've got done so far.

 

 

[Fuchur]

That looks very promising Dan .
Keep up the great work!

Best regards
*Fuchur*

[Wildsided]

Thanks for the support guys. I have got Ursa's body rigged and threw together a walk cycle to test it out. Still need to rig his cloak and hood.

 

[Wildsided]

Done some more work on Ursa. Finished rigging his cloak (except the hood) and added his staff (The staff of the north). I set the star fragments in the end of the staff to glow and tried to do a render. But for some reason, even though the star is the only thing in the scene set to glow, A:M is making the fur trim of the cloak glow as well. I even went into the surface settings of the fur and set glow to off, and the group that the fur material is assigned to and set it's glow property to off and the fur is still glowing. Think it might be a bug.

[robcat2075]

Hmmm.

Is that all one model?

[Wildsided]

The staff (which contains the only part with glow turned on) is a separate model brought in as an action object. 

[robcat2075]

What happens if you add it in the Chor instead of as an action object?

[Wildsided]

Same thing. This is a new chor, seperate models with no constraints.

[robcat2075]

Does the character glow if the staff has not been added?

[Wildsided]

Just for the sake of argument, I pulled in the bernie model that also uses hair (separate materials to Ursa's hair) and they glow too, even though the star in the staff is the only thing that is set to glow. I also tried removing the staff and inserting a generic cube which was set to glow and got the same result. If I remove the objects with the glow property then the fur doesn't glow. It seems that if anything is set to glow then any hair particles are made to glow as well.

[robcat2075]

Could you post a sample case of objects that this happens with?

[Wildsided]

Would this work? It's 2 models, both boxes. One has a hair material, the other has a group set to glow. Put both in same chor and rendered. Hair glows.

Glow Hair.prj

[robcat2075]

hmmm.

With Multipass ON the hair doesn't glow

 

With Multipass OFF the hair does glow

[robcat2075]

Thanks for the sample PRJ.

I have submitted that as a bug

https://reports.hash.com/view.php?id=7128

[Wildsided]

Thanks Robert. Good to know I can turn multipass on as a workaround. Saves me rendering it twice with and without glow and compositing the 2 together or adding the glow separately in Photoshop. 

[robcat2075]

Steffen has pounced on that bug and lists it as "Resolved"... in v19.5

There is no timeline for a release of v19.5, it is still in alpha, so for now the work-around will need to work.

I tested back to v15, the problem seems to be new in v19.

Thanks for spotting that problem!

 

[Wildsided]

Glad to be of service.

So, the whole point of making the Ursa model was because I wanted to release a free short story on Kindle for Christmas. Sadly it turns out that you can't release a free ebook on Kindle (There is a way that involves releasing through another website for free, then releasing it on kindle for 0.99 cents and telling Amazon that it's free elsewhere so they price match but it takes weeks and isn't guaranteed). So instead I converted the finished ebook into images and released it as a series of pictures on my Facebook Author Page.

If you fancy giving it a read (and maybe a cheeky follow) the page is https://www.facebook.com/DanielFSkeltonauthor/ 

If not the cover looks like this.