So, I was asked (told maybe), why dont you make a nice intro/bumper/outtro for the upcoming managers meeting? Sure I said. Instead of turning to my tried & true animation friend (ae4.1) I turned to Carrara. Well that wasnt the smartest thing I have done over the last week. In concept this should have been so easy to do. I took a clip art of the US, turned it into a spline object, smacked it on an infinate plane and threw down some cities. the camera starts above and swings down to each of the cities between the segments. I set it up and let it rip. I ended up saving it in after effects, but I barely made deadline b/c of the extra work I had to do to it. First problem: Whats with the stupid black dots on the horizion? I had those in my privious ant animation but later found out that land primitives leave gaping holes in polys that they touch unless you convert them to a different modeler...maybe its not the land primitive? Maybe its something wrong with the inifiate plane? It wouldnt be so bad except that the dots are moving around all over the place. Second problem: Whats with dropped polygons? you can also see this in the picture above...when I did the wireframe render there where no problems but after the final rendering I had a fair number of polydrops...for the most part it was ok but towards the end it was getting rediculous. Anyway any help with there two questions would be greatly appreciated b/c I have another big animation coming up next week...I wont have a lot of time to render that sort of stuff out over and over. If you want to see the first part of the opening movie let me know and tomorrow I will .mpeg it...Im to tired to do anything now..except get mad at the stupid black dots :)

Sweet! Bummer on the problems. I dont have any answers but would really love to see the animation(s). Clint

Hey Brent, I've had the dots before on both animations and stills but it's 'fixable'. If I remember, Antoine Clappier, from the egroups list mentioned a workaround for this know bug. You just add a little more haze and fog to the scene. (really minor amounts so it doesn't interfere with the forground) Also, a light amount of 'depth of field' also eliminates the issue. I've had no problems since then. Should you have to do that....well, no. But at least it's still workable. I've also had dropped polys when the camera got real close (physically) to a low fidelity spline object. Was yours a spline or a vertex? Renders with a zoom-in haven't had that problem. I also keep the spline resolution up above 500 just cuz now. Mark

Thanks for the tips Mark. I have tried to apply depth of field earlier for the last few months but it always looks weird..Does the Carrara bible talk about doing this? I think I read on the egroups list that Carrara accidently had its depth of field settings backwards...I'll have to do some test renders. Hopefully by the end of the day I'll have some time to post up that open animation..its 20 secs of cheese but there will be a couple secs of it that may find its way into my resume :) -remember...as long as your project has about 3 secs that can look good on your resume then its a successful project!

Why is it that we have this dysfunctional need to work hours and hours for 3 seconds of glory? :)

Beautiful Gold Texture though!

Nice looking project, Brent. I've had some similar issues in RDS, actually, so I was glad to read these suggestions. Replying to Mark's (probably) retorical question, I don't know why we work so long for so little, but it's indemic in media production. Ever see Creepshow 2? There's a scene in which a blob floats around a lake and eats teenagers. There's one shot (about 2 seconds on screen) where a pill bottle gets dropped and is shattered by the blob. It took us eight and a half hours to shoot that damn scene. Kinda par for the course, though.... Keep rendering!