Hey, I like things that fly. He'll just have ot lean forward so he doesn't fall over :0

No, nothing wrong. According to Antoine, one of Carrara's creators, boolean's are notoriously problematic, even in other modelers. His suggestions include: increasing the poly count of the objects and then decimating after the operation; Increasing the Fidelity settings for the operation; trying to use the spline modeler if appropriate, and finally, avoiding booleans if possible. Most of the funky artifact issues are a symptom of too low a poly count on the faces being changed by the boolean, however. Mark

I couldn't get it to work on a standard plane either. However, I created a cube with no thickness to it and it worked fine.

Clint is right. For a wide range of skies, Bryce is the master. If sky is one of the most important elements in your image, then a Bryce backdrop is the way to go. I've had the best luck with Carrara and windblown and sunset types of skies. I'm not saying the above image is a good sky image but there are some things that I've found to help. 1. Use all of the cloud layers; change their color, density, x-y ration and altitude. Density I usually have around 2 percent. 2. Use fog and haze; again select 'horizon' colors and have them obscure the actual horizon. 3. Throw in a volumetric cloud; either with the native Carrar Cloud function or with Lost Horizons Software Volumetric Cloud (my personal favorite since you can change colors within the cloud itself) The addition of the volumetric creates a little more irregularity in the image than the Four Elements does. Hope this helps! Mark

Half the fun is getting there!

When you use the "add cylinder" function, the above image is the only way to do it. I prefer, when mapping is involved, to create the cylinder in the spline modeling room. That way you can better control the surfaces that are being mapped onto with the parametric mapping funcion. (side 0, side 1, side 2, etc) Good luck! Mark

Hey Brent, I could finally download it. Given the time that you had, it's awesome man! I wanna see what happens to the semi as reaches the end of the road at highway speed though. :0 Mark

Just an FYI type of thing. The problem in opening was simply a delay while the Mac Flash was opeining the PC Flash file. The file consistently took 4 minutes to open/translate on two different workstations (and they're not speed slouches either) Why? I don't know. The file was 9M though. The symptoms look liked a crashed application though; the clock stopped keeping track of time and no disk activity for about 2 of the four minutes. At the 2 minute mark, the progress clock started functioning again and the disks started activity again. However, the system clock on screen remained inactive until the file was completely open.

The Carrara and RDS manuals do a pretty good job of explaining the differences between the CODEC's. I hate to sound stupid, but, have you looked there? :)

Hello Danny, My comments are based upon the assumption that you know how to already apply a texture map within Carrara. I'll also assume that you are importing an OBJ poser export. I've always used the UV mapper utility to create 'new' artwork for the OBJ file. I'll then create a new trasparency map and apply it to the transperency channel with the 'texture map' feature found in the shader tree. I don't want to insult you if you already know this stuff. Are you familiar with the processes that I've described? Mark

Nice and clean. Looks good. Something that I'm trying to get better at myself is environmental/radiosity types of lighting. In this case, if you added some spots in front of the paintings, shinning back towards the ceiling spots and out to the floor, you could create the effect of bounced/reflected light. It's just a "how real do you want this to look/" kind of decision. Maybe the scale of the wood grain on the floor is a bit large. If you update it, I'd love to see the changes. Mark

I'll check it out. Thanks! Mark

You 'da man Eric.

Lots of coffee and then a look through my kids picture books. :) Actually, sometimes focusing on a 'mood' opens doors to content that I wouldn't have visited otherwise. Mark

Hi Chris, Sorry that I haven't gotten back on the piston thing. Haven't had the time to play with that yet. I do more stills then IK animation so I'll have to spend a little time. I'm sure that you'll find no two paths are the same to professional 3D and illustration. I started 15 years ago as an airbrush artist. Because of a couple of specific clients I force fed myself techincal illustration skills. About that time computers were becoming viable illustration tools so I migrated to them. 3D tools are a natural for techincial work so I jumped in with RayDream 3. Most early business came from referrals and relentless networking. Then when the bucks started slowly coming in I started advertising in national illustration directories like American Showcase, Workbook and Black Book. I found that I could sell more illustration if I also controlled the design of the jobs that they went into. Consequently, I started doing more and more design work to feed my illustration habit :) The networking/referral aspect is still a large part of marketing though. Basically, I think that if you want to succeed in a illustrator/animator field, you have to have some kind of dysfunctional need to produce imagery. That way you'll put up with all the garbage it takes to produce 3 seconds of glory. Good luck, Mark