Looks good! If you're interested, here's a fast, easy way to weatherize with a procedural shader combination. Mark

I'm unclear based on your posts. In message #1 and #4 you talk about Cylindrical mapping. In message #7 you indicate spherical mapping. Which one is the culprit? Any bug that's figured out now is one less to deal with later!

I tried to duplicate it but havn't had been able to. What kind of shape are you mapping to?

I've had good luck with the Parent/child and Range of Motion IK features. Mark

Yeah, I've had that happen before. There is something in that particular texture map file that Carrara doesn't like. Resave the map, change the name. Next move the original texture map file so Carrara doesn't know where to look for it. From here there will be two possiblilites: 1. Carrara opens the file, asks for the texture map and you ignore the request. Then apply the new Tmap after the Carrara file opens. 2. The file is hosed and you have to go to one of your back up files. I've paid waaaaaay to much tuition in the school of life for stuff like this. For any image I'm working on whether it's Carrara, Photoshop or somehting else about every fifteen minutes I'll do a Save As or pop over to the finder and ducplicate the file. Should you have to do this? No. Does being paranoid help when a file goes bad? Yes. Good luck!

The Lost Horizons morph target feature is outstanding. Love the hair! Mark

Spiraling circles make pretty good dreadlocks. You can then apply the deformer of your choice to make them curve. Mark

Also, in the Carrara free stuff section here, I uploaded a wheel that is made completely in the spline modeler. The egroups turtorial is for a Mesh Model. Either one works ok.

Check out the Carrara e-groups list. There were several posts and I think a solution to the .DLL errors just a week ago.

Hi Brent, There are a couple of issues here: 1) Use the spline modeler a little more thoroughly. The image at the left is a spline model from a simple circle. Doing it this way prevents the need to use boolean subtraction create the the shape. For the lighter's coils I'd actually create a simple cylinder and place it within the lighter 'spline' shape and shade it like it's glowing 2) It's easier to shade spline objects than a vertex object within Carrara (controling independent shaders on a single object that is). The image on the right shows how you can add specific shaders to specific areas of a spline object. You can control shape, placement etc. much more accuratly than on a vertex object. The workaround for a vertex object is to use UV Mapper. UV Mapper is an outstanding tool but adds a couple of extra steps that you don't need with simple mechanical objects like the Lighter. Hope this helps! Mark

It's easier to show than to tell... Mark

First of all, please feel free to tell me, "get a life already!" Lighting used to always bite me in the butt in dark scenes. Eric Winemiller from Digital Carver's Guild shared this tip with me in this forum somtime back. Add dark blue lights to illuminate dark areas in a scene unless you actually want them to disappear. (Think of night scenes in movies) I'm not saying that image above is right for your scene DB but here is the technique: add a distant light (or 2) with shadows turned off and color set to deep blue. In the above scene the strenght of the light is 160%. Also, I've got a dark blue ambiant light. That way it emphasises textures and still reveals the dark areas while the viewer still interprets the scene as 'dark'. The bright warm lights in the scene over come the blue where they need to. You've got a great scene going so please ignore this if it's no use to you! Mark

Nice. If my work didn't have deadlines it would never be done. Maybe change the candel light color to a warmer color than white and the amibient light to something more on the blue side instead of gray? Mark

Who knows? Antoine Clappier, the Carrara developer/engineer that participates on the e-groups Carrara fourm, indicated that Adobe has licensed some of the Carrara technology for one of their projects but has not bought the total package. No other clues given except that the legal aspects of the deal are c r a w l i n g to a close. He did indicate that the development of the product has not stopped and a verion 1.x would be released reletively quickly upon the ownership announcment. ( which is supposed to be soon, whatever that means in legal, deal-making timlines) He also indicated that if the deal wasn't legitimate, he would have moved on long ago.

Line settings are No Fill and Black Stroke at 1 point. Started with the Spiral tool with 10 segments and 98% decay rate at 1" diameter (or 1.5, I don't remember). Then Filter>distort>zigzag with some value like 15 per segment and displacement of .02" with "curved" selected for the zigzag joints. Then drew a straight line from the last segment out and did the zigzag thing but played with the values until it looked right. Next was inceasing the stroke weight of the line and spiral to 6 points or so. Then went to the Object>Path>Outline Stroke feature. (This was done to create the thinckness of the door) Finally, I went to Pathfinder>Unite to create a continuous shape and saved the file as an Adobe Illustrator (AI) version 3 file and imported it into Carrara in the Spline Modeler Room. In Carrara, for shapes like these, I will usually set the Object Fidelity at the maximum of 1200% so that the Spline Modeler will accuratly fill the little curves. Hope this helps! Mark