CompuServe Thread

Hi to all, you might remember my question regarding the lost polygones in my animation. After I`ve spent some time with the problem I found out something curios: My scene contains 350 cubes standing on a large ground. The cubes are box-mapped and the ground was planar mapped. My camera flies through the cubearray wich looks like a big labyrinth. When I rendered the animation I saw holes in the cubes and in the ground. But only the faces wich are very close to my camera were lost and not in all frames, only in a few. I made the materials two sided, set the Z-Clipping to 0.001, scaled up the whole scene by more than 1000%, I changed the camera lens: nothing worked. I used a basic material (without bump maps and other tricky settings) but this didn`t help too. After all I break my cubes and the ground in a few hundred thousend faces. Now I had less holes but still enough to cry… My next try was to render only the ground (I hided all other objects). Yeah! The ground was rendered correctly. Now I unhided the cubes and rendered again. Now the holes were back, even in the ground. I gave the cubes a normal material, used planar mapping and rendered the scene again. Now there were no holes in my scene!!!!! Conclusion: box-mapped cubes can cause holes (unrendered faces) in the cubes and even in the ground where the cubes are standing on. The holes appear close to the camera and only in some frames. This problem took three days and all my nerves to figure out. I think I won`t use box mapping in the future…<bg>. Just a little story from Germany, Michael Bassier