CompuServe Messages

Very GOOD point. That's one thing I was wondering about in the process of doing walk-thrus. Very often, the camera will be in one particular room, and only those objects need to be considered for rendering. What's more, all the various ray-traced lights, etc. that might exist in other rooms are likewise unneccesary. Nonetheless, their existence in other parts of the scene greatly increases rendering time. I would like to see an ability to switch thesse objects on and off throughout the animation, just like you can DISPLAY/HIDE and DISPLAY/UNHIDE objects in a more gobal sense. That way, lights that are only visible in one particular room can be left off, furniture in that room may be left hidden until you enter that room, thus saving MOUNDS of computation time. So far, how I've been getting around this has been laborious. I've been choosing ssequences that I render seperately, and turn off the uneeded objects and lights globally before rendering the segment. As for ray-traced lights, etc., I have tended to keep their falloff value at a minimum until the camera enters the room (or – just before), then adjust the falloff to the needed value until after the camera leaves. Obvioussly, this can be done with proper keyframing. However, being able to flick ocjects and lights into and out of existence would be IMMENSELY helpful in architectural walk-thrus. I also wonder – this may be a basic question here, but is there a way to switch from one camera to another in the middle of an animation? -JK