Hi Brent, One issue that I haven't seen addressed is the poly count where the 'decal' goes on. I've had to use the Multires Subdivide feature to increase the poly count where the decal goes on. The higher the poly count, the less distortion in the decal. Mark

Thanks for the kind words Clint :) Hi Keithw, Man, you've started thinking about some stuff at the tip of the "ice berg" so to speak. Any of the functions in the Carrara shaders that has a black and white component is fair game for transparency: Slope, ripples, mandelbrot sets, psychedlic patterns etc. Within the transparency channel itself you can mix, add, subtract or multiply various parts of those together too. Want to try some really cool stuff? On a complex shader, try dragging/duplicating the entire multichannel mixer to the transparency channel and replace the color component with black or white. There aren't enough hours in the day..... :) Mark

Nice total environment. Good light control! Is that building to the right floating? :) 'Ya know, after the jet gets destroyed the buildings could get sucked into the sky one by one..... Mark

There are a couple of things to take into consideration when pricing your work. A good average for raw animation (no post, no sound) is about $1000 a minute which works out to $16 a second. Most animited GIFs, however, are only a couple of seconds long and require post production and optimiazation for good results on a web page. Really it's kind of a discernment on your part where your customers threshold of pain is :) They should wince a little but not kill the job. Just because 3-D modeling is fun and animation is blast is no reason to ever give your work away (Even though it's tempting to do it for free). My shop generally doesn't let an animated GIF (3-d Animated that is) out the door for less than $160 with the average around $250 for a simple 18 to 24 frame (3-4 second) posted and optimized GIF. For complex or detailed animation, modeling work has to be built into the cost. Usually the cost of the animation development (model building, scene setting) will increase the bottom line 3 to 4 times. But this is a 'professional' price. If you're just doing it for fun it's a little more subjective. Charge enough that you don't feel like you are being taken advantage. Or, if you have your eye on a Plug-in for Carrara, charge whatever the Plug-in costs. If this is a direction or side-line business type of thing that you'd like to pursue, I highly recommend getting the Graphic Artist's Guild Handbook for Pricing and Ethical Guidelines. It gives sample contracts, a wide range of considerations for things that will allow you to bill (and negotiate) for more money, when ask for payments or partial payments as well as ways to contractually set yourself up to avoid getting burned. Hope that this isn't more than you wanted to know. Mark

Well then, there are two ways to create that shape: 1. Create a cylinder and rotate and scale it to match, or, 2. Draw and oval in the spline (Free Form for RDS) modeler and adjust the extrusion path for length. Either way you choose, when the boolean operation is performed the resulting object will be a vertex object. Hope this helps! Mark

So you are calling the horizontal cylinder in frame with the description "Now use boolean operations to cut out the neckline and sleeves" the 'tube'? Just want to make sure that we are talking about the same thing. Mark

Hi Oz, Which tutorial are you looking at? Mark

See, you should have just said what you were trying to do. This is composed of two groups with the same deformer applied. Hope that this helps. Mark

Hi Vern, In the modeling room, under the pull down menu 'geometry' is an option for 'surface fidelity'. It defaults at 100 and max's out at 1200. If you are creating still images, then max the fidelity. If you are creating animations, experiement with which setting gives you the best quality for render time. Mark

Both Carrara and RDS are great software. (although I prefer Carrara) The interface for Carrara will be more intuitive if since you've been using P and B. If you're just going to be producing content for P or B then the RDS package can be obtained a little cheaper than Carrara. However, if you're going to render final images from the program then Carrara is a good choice. It has a better faster renderer. However, when Adobe finally finishes the paperwork, Carrara will be a supported continued product. RDS will not. Both programs have their quirks. RDS has some that I got used to so when I transitioned to C it was frustrating to learn different ones. However, starting from square one either one would be fine. I learned all the ways possible to crash RDS. I'm still learning them (and avoiding them) in Carrara. Regarding Carrara, from what I've read in this forum, some people have pretty solid performance from either Mac or PC platforms. But there are others that have more 'issues' than others. Either way, you'll have some new imaging/content creation 'doors' opened to you. Mark

Fun start! Mark

Thanks all. Been on vacation and just got back. Mark

Yea, what he said.

I like seeing what can be done with the vertex modeler since I'm a 'Spline' guy. I haven't taken the time to mess around in the vertex modeler. Looking forward to the updates!

Very Cool.