#Pre Sigg Teasers
7 messages in this thread
Hi Everyone,
I trust you're all well and are gearing up for an excellent Siggraph!!
A few questions please….
1. I can't get my shadow mapped spotlights to exclude vapour. I want to use
a raytraced spot on it to get the wispy shadows. Even though I've
excluded the vapour object, its' shadow is still blocky.
Can shadow mapped spotlights properly exclude vapour?? If so, any
ideas what I'm doing wrong?? It's a simple scene and there's
absolutely no chance that I'm excluding the wrong object.
2. Has anyone had the problem when network rendering that some of the
frames are missing a line or two at the bottom? This doesn't happen
everytime, but enough to notice something's up.
3. I'll be uploading a few images which demonstrate a problem we've had
a number of times. This is where lines appear across viewports, zoom
extents ceases to work, coordinates go screwy and objects disappear
but their names are still selectable under Select/Object/By Name. Any
ideas how to overcome this prob??
4. Using the RAIN.AXP I want to render the splashes without seeing the
raindrops. Any hints??
5. Has anyone had the following problem when working in the Lofter:
I change the User view to a Right view, then select Rotate/Path and
rotate the path 90 degrees so that it is vertical in the Right View.
I would now expect in the Top view to see a dot – effectively looking
straight down on the path and the Front View should show me a face on
view of the path standing up.
As soon as I rotate the path and do a Zoom Extents, all three
viewports (Top, Right, Front) show me the same thing: A path going
from the top of the viewport to the bottom. This doesn't seem correct
to me. Is it??
Thanks for any replies..
Andy Roberts
BITS Corp.
P.S. I'll hopefully be in Orlando from Saturday 23rd for 6 days, are
there any parties I should know about/try to crash?!?
P.P.S Thank you John for the ticket!! It turned up a couple days ago.
I'll pop over to see you on the Syndesis Booth…
Hi Andy,
1) Spotlight exclusion does not include shadows. You need to use
Modify/Object/Attributes on the Vapor object to turn off the shadows. You might
try Ray-Traced shadows for a great, if slower-rendering effect.
2) The only thing I can think of regarding your net rendering problem is that
you may not be rendering to a NULL device on all slaves. Does the problem show
up from the same machines consistantly? Check to see that each slave's
3dsnet.set file properly reflects rendering to the null device.
3) This definitely sounds like a corrupt 3ds.exe file. Check your HD for
integity and viruses. Then re-install 3DS from the original master disks.
4) How about an opacity map that hides all the drops, but reveals the bottom of
the AXP box where the "splashes" are? Worth a try?
5) Interesting problem here. When I follow your steps, the top viewport problem
is intermittent, but *always* occurs after using Zoom Extents. Bringing in a
simple shape from the Shaper and clicking Zoom Extents always fixes the
problem, FWIW. Maybe Jonas could take a closer look at this one — Jonas?
Don't forget the CIS/ASOFT Siggraph party at the DisneyWorld Hilton on Sunday
night, Andy. I'm gonna re-announce it today, up in the Take Five section. I'm
sure you realize there is a Adesk/3DS party Wednesday night.
Hope to see you there!
-Alan
In addition to what Alan said, you can turn off shadows for excluded objects in
the 3ds.set file with the SHADOW-EXCLUSION=ON command.
– G
Hmm… I can't help you, but you made me think of a question I had to
bounce off of everyone.
On Monday, I saw Pink Floyd at Giants Stadium. Best show I've been to
yet. I came home Tuesday and started modeling the stadium and stage and
such… after getting the basics down, I decided to try and get some
laser-light effects, if at all possible.
I used a long, narrow spot and a "wispy" smoke-like material. The
light was set to avoid everything but the smoke object, but the smoke didn't
light up! I've done this same method before with street light cones, and it
worked fine… why didn't this?
If anyone has any ideas on laser-simulation (animation is key here, so
I don't want to draw in bright green lines on the final images), I'd really
appreciate it.
You could try adding self-illumination to the smoke/light material until it is
the desired intensity, Thomas.
FWIW,
-Alan