Quote - > Quote - I try to avoid postwork like its a plague, outside of distance blurs, I prefer all output be direct from the scene...

 

Can I ask what is your reasoning behind this?

I kind of think of an image or animation directly out of the render room as only half finished.

 

wayne k

guam usa

 

I go back and forth on this myself.  Initially, I used a lot of filters and post work, but found it time consuming.  I also noticed that a lot of (overly?) serious 3D artists take the purist attittude and see post work almost as an amateurs's coverup of lacking modeling skills or using the wrong software for the task.  Since I actually enjoy post working, I've taken to occasionally tweaking a render by hand though I'm more likely to run them through a VirtuaDub filter chain to get a certain look and leaving all but the most unacceptable artifacts or imperfections alone.  Animation is a different story, it just has to look right coming out as I'm not going to take the time to hand re-touch potentially 1000s of frames.  3D is a medium, and with all media you'll find those who want to keep it pure and those who want to mix it liberally with other media.

I was impressed to see a condensation effect on glass achieved in Carrara by using the replicator in the shading domain.  Not that I understand how to do that yet, as I've just gotten Carrara 6, but it seems like it is entirely possible to link a metaball emitter to a shading domain to create a material that sweats.  One way to have something melt is to have it shrink while a puddle forms.  I'd convert the object to a single mesh, with no interior detail.  Then I'd try to create a morph target that was this object with all of it's polys pushed inward, and edges softened.  In all honesty, I'd probably export an obj to Wings (which I'm having a hard time moving away from) and use "tighten" in vertice mode to soften the model (it averages out edge lengths) being careful not to alther the object in any destructive way (adding/deleting polys).  I'd import this in as a morph for the original mesh and apply a shader that would emit metaballs which would ideally drip and flow from the object as it morphs to it's softer smaller shape.  You might actually have to create a seperate puddle and morph it also, as I believe metaballs need to disappear over time to avoid consuming all your available resources.