Another branch series. With the inclusion of the nest. Please to keep in mind I'm not looking for total realism. And this isn't a final image, as the final will be an animation. This is merely testing coloring of bird with branch and nest. All the key models are almost completed. As usual comments/suggestions are definetly welcome

looking pretty awesome nic.. will look great with your final background. the thing that looks the most "in progress" at this point is his body texture. Keep going looks really good. Branch looks great. Kevin

This has a nice look to it, keep up the good work. Mike

Looks pretty good. Maybe you could get some interesting results with a scaly or feathery bump map on the bird. Or maybe "Anything Grows" can do a feather-like surface.

Looks pretty spiff to me! -Kix

I'd do anything grows the problem is I will be animating the bird with bones, I might give it a go and see how it works out.

Looking good. What did you do for the nest? Agrows with a single shader? Or multiple ones? Marc

Anything grows, lots of tweaking. And a simple shader. Just a mixer with turbulence as the blend and green and brown as the colors. Simple is oft best:) Thanks for the comments. And the work continues. If nothing else I'll see what anything grows looks like on the bird, even if I don't animate. The problem is that anything grows when animated, does a nice flicker effect, which in the next upgrade if one comes, I hope eric fixes if at all possible. Brian

Brian,

The flicker effect has been gone for a while. Check out the using Anything Grows with bones tutorial at

http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/tutorials/agrobone/

for details.

Here's a sample of the Bone Mode feature at work.

http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/tutorials/agrobone/glider.mov

Best regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D extensions for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Yeah someone told me about that after my post, I'm still getting flickering of strands. In order to prevent this, the bone option should be checked? Its not a rigged bone character that I'm getting flickering from, but a spline object with modifier. Brian

Brian, You're right, it doesn't work with modifiers. I'll take a look and see if it's something we can fix. Best regards, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild 3D extensions for Carrara http://digitalcarversguild.com

Brian,

After checking out your sample file, there were a couple of things going on, both of which were easily correctable.

First, Anything Grows did recalculate once in the animation. It happened when the renderer changed the level of detail on the spline object as it got closer. Far away it created a low level of detail object, closer, it upped the LOD so the edges would stay smooth. Changing the level of detail setting on the spline object, by selecting Geometry|Surface Fidelity while in the spline modeler, to 5000 fixed that problem. It forced it to stay high all the time even when it was far from the camera.

The second issue was sample rate for the renderer. When you were far away, some of the stuff in shadow would appear and disappear. The strands themselves were big enough to be picked up in each frame, but some of the partially illuminated strands would slide in and out between the renderer's lightrays as the camera moved. To fix this problem kick up the AntiAliasing to Best. When set on Best, information from a much higher sampling rate is introduced into the image and those partially illuminated strands show up on every frame.

As I checked into the modifier/spline object thing, I remembered why I didn't do that in the first place. Most of the modifiers change the number of facets as they animate the object. With a different number of facets, I have no way of keeping the strands in the same relative place from frame to frame so as the underlying mesh changes, the distribution of the strands changes. Bones on the other hand do not change the number or order of the facets so I can go back to the original unboned mesh to calculate distribution of the strands, length, width, start direction, etc. and then use the facet's actual position to calculate start position, modify the direction, and gravity.

Best regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D extensions for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Hi, Eric, Thanks for the detailed comments. I learned a few things about how Carrara works in the process. These WIP posts really are useful. Marc