CompuServe Messages

> It's mainly the shadows, so if you come up with any new insight on the subject, feel free to contact me Well, I'm getting new insights every day I use this. I forgot to mention that you can import a VUE file into WB, so it *does* do animated objects, but still without IXP or KXP control (basically no IPAS of any sort). >One last thing, I'm a little unclear about this Z-Buffer thing. You explained that it allows you to have >someone walk behind a tree, etc. But how is it used in Video-Post? Well, I haven't tried this yet <g> but the manual says you render in WB and create WB's z-buffer file. Then you use a supplied IPAS which combines the two z-buffers (3DS and WBs) in Video Post (or in WB, — you can go either way) that would respect each other's accordingly. So, if an object is a certain distance from the camera, theorectically it should have a z-buffer entry that caused it to occlude an object further away from the camera. I'm going to try this a lot this coming three-day weekend, but one thing I did do last night was export the WB mesh and bring it into 3DS and render shadows of my moving object on it (a la Martin's 3D Studio Special Effects technique, except in this case the shadows were more than faked onto a white plane, they actually were the surface coutours, etc.). Then I combined this in Video Post with the WB background (no z-buffer stuff yet) and the results were very good, except that I needed to ray-trace the shadows in 3DS to match the quality of the shadows in WB (this is something WB does better than 3DS, IMHO). The only think I didn't like about this was the mesh imported from WB was very complex, and using Optimize didn't help too much (maybe I need to play somewhat with the Optimize parameters, but I only had a few hours last night to try all this and still watch U.S. Open tennis). But I think I'm close to my final technique.