I have to confess that I cheated on the lights a little bit. I actually made two images. One that was covered in the lights and another that was plain. The lights were created by speckle painting a black square and then cutting black strips into it to give it the decking look. I then tiled that 4X4 in the glow channel along with the grey/grey squares for the sides. The center equatorial trench lights are actually spots in the glow channel. After I had both images, I used a linear fill in the mask channel usin paint shop pro for post processing to bleed the lit image into the unlit image.

The white stuff gets pretty small when you render pretty big. The airplane image had no touchup to it at all. Here's the same thing rendered straight at 500XSomething. You can defintitely see the difference.

The way I've gotten around this is to render the thing huge and then reduce it using a 2D program later. It seems to reduce the whiteness some but not completely. Here's my airplane completed. I rendered this about 2000 X 1000 and reduced it. The words and stripes are what I had the white striping issue. This is the best I can do. -Kix

Put simply, I think they're outstanding. And just another note Terri, I've taken on the vertex modeler for my B-Movie project for the first time. I started with a monster head. We'll see if it comes out but so far, it looks ok. Seeing what you're doing is a strong inspiration. I can't wait to see how it turns out!

If I understand you right (and I'm not sure because I'm unfamiliar with the term transmapping), I think you can pull off what you're after. The image shows the settings I used to create a shader with a cheesy painting of a flower in the color channel and it's black and white transparency map. The trick is to make sure no light interactions occur when fully transparent and I also switched on the light through transparency settings for the final render. I also did slap this shader on a sphere and I put that sphere between the camera and my Imperial Sentry droid with the light positioned so it would cast a shadow the way it did. I inset that render into the image in the lower right corner. Hope this is what you're after. -Kix

It's possible that you're using some kind of object which isn't supported (I'm taking a guess here). What you should try is changing the modeler used. Carrara Method: Select your object and go to the modeling room. In one of the pulldowns, change the modeler to the vertex modeler. Do this for both of your objects. Now try to do your boolean operations. Also, you can only do boolean operations on two objects at a time. They can't be grouped objects either but two primary objects and the have to be in the same group. RDS Method Same thing but you change the native modeler in a different way and I can't remember off the top of my head how to do that. Give this a spin and take heed to my warnings about groups.

Nice water. Did you do this in Carrara or RDS? This could be a good idea but you need a damsel in distress! I don't have poser so I won't be able to do a person either.

You've pretty much nailed down the export shape function to get the explosion flame cloud shape figured. The sparks were done by fussing with the particle fountain in Carrara. I've never used the fountain in RDS but I set the fountain to run for a short time with a wide range of velocities with a wide range of lifetimes. That means you get a very interesting dispersal of sparks and lifetimes. Your comment about the shadows is dead on. The light is just one bulb with the cross screen and glow turned on. I also turned on the falloff to maximum and limited the range so it would actually sort of disappear at the right moment. I'm really impressed with the way the disc turned out. I'll see if I can recreate the explosion stuff and send you some detail. I did it quickly late at night and I don't remember too much more than what I've said already. One weird thing about it is that if you do the trick I employed, you can't make the object completely invisible. I think it gets confused with the fronts and backs of some of the fills of the shapes.

I'm a proffessional software developer (70% of my job anyway) and all the things you've mentioned are absolutely dead on. If you'll notice in the original post, I was reluctant to "hold" the list and was more interested in an FAQ on this site which is more appropriate. Some things. 1.) I have posted bugs to the Carrara site at Eovia and I've actually received reasonable feedback. If your experience is older, perhaps you should give them another shot. 2.) There's been some chatter about another patch (past 1.0.1). I think it's probably going to be Carrara 2.0 and we'll all be buying it. They're supposed to be releasing it this summer. It's a complete supposition on my part but probably accurate. 3.) I am another person who couldn't get the code to work out of the box and had to apply the patch. All the work I've posted on this forum has come from Carrara as well as many others so it does run. I've been a Ray Dream user for many years and the transition hasn't been painless. Making the change requires some significant effort on a person and I know many haven't made that jump yet. That's fine because I truly hope the next version will be a lot more stable and hopefully more powerful. I thank you for your comments because I think they're the realistic side of keeping a bug list. Keep posting.

Well I think there is a significant value to creating a list. I've only truly been compiling this list for about a month and I'm actually just learning the program. I'm a little reluctant to say I'll keep the list but I can give it a try for a start. If people e-mail me the bug in the format to fit into the table on the site (i.e. send me the information to put into the four boxes in each row), I'll post it. If we could do the FAQ thing, I think that would also have a lot of value. What do you all think?

Here's my site. http://www.concentric.net/~Franzs/cdp/index.html I set up this page to look like it's a group of people but actually, it's just me at the moment. I have a friend who's going to be helping me with a project and so making it look like it's a group of people is more sharing for credit. There's a link on the page which describes my RDS to Carrara transition experience. The bug list is in there.

I used a formula in the glow channel and the transparency in the disk. That seemed to work reasonably well but not what I had originally planned. I also used several animated shaders. The shaders in Carrara are most defintitely different than in RDS and will require a significant learning curve for me. The more I use Carrara though, the better I feel about it. I would really like a patch and I'm dying to know what's in the next version (radiosity?). I also used the explosion tutorial that's on this site but I had to cheat Carrara to do it because Carrara can't employ a deformer when changing from one modeler to another. RDS can't do this either when you can't change modelers but I figured a way to do it but it isn't clean. You export the shape and the import it back in and that seems to work.

Very very impressive! Nice paint job.

Well I give you an A+!. It's becoming obvious to me I need to learn a lot more about the vertex modeler.

The shader capabilities in Carrara are significantly more powerful than in RDS (and consequently significantly more complex and complicated to learn). I confess that I was also significantly frustrated with Carrara and there are some things in Carrrara which are missing from RDS but I've made a committment (sp?) to use it and so far, it's working out. RDS is in Carrara, you just have to take some time to find it and learn to use it. The renderer is faster and in some things it looks a lot better. Some things are not better (soft shadows for an example and I can't display the shape numbers in the spline modeler anymore) but in general, it's ok. I have a webpage which describes the transition that I've gone through between RDS and Carrara. I have some things I need to add to it and then I'm going to post the address. I have a posted bug list. Does anybody else have a posted bug list?