Thanx Mark! I've tried Motion Paths a few times and was always clunking along. You showed very simply how to do it a better way. Thanx! :D

REALLY nice work! I like how you go right through some clouds and then around others... nice camera direction.
How many different clouds do you have? Or, are they all one instance of a volumetric cloud?
What is your scale? Very large with a large distance of camera motion? Or, very short camera motion with small scale clouds? (I'm curious as to how much detail is really available within a volumetric cloud.)
Sorry for all the questions, but I do love to pick the minds of folks who have created nice looking animations.

Yes Pedrith. The surface replicator that Dex mentioned does do that and more. Randomize the size/placement/angle following the geometry of any surface, with a texture (picture) based control of placement. (Place a greyscale pic in the right place, then the layout of the duplicates follows the 'brighter is more' mentality.)

When you go to the render room and pull up on the 'Current scene/Batch Queue' tab across the bottom you can add scenes (files) to the render queue and make whatever changes you want to the render settings of the file. Different resolutions, quality settings, 'Save render to file...' settings, blah, blah, blah.

What I hear from folks who do renders for print, (I usually do my work for screen or video,) that setting your render to twice the DPI of the output device, then downsampling in PhotoShop or (insert program name here) is the best bet, since it does a cleaner anti-aliasing.

Hope this helps.

Look in the properties for the camera and you will find the Lens length option. Adjust that to get your field of view.

Good luck and welcome to the insanity! ;)

It's fine... I know it's more of Poser world here... but there are others of us who slip in from time to time... ;)

Mine was done in Carrara. (Not everyone here at R'Osity uses Poser...)

I did an opening for a conference that included a simple character animation, logos spinning into orbit around a wireframe globe, with continents, and an ending piece. (Took over 52 hours to render the globe part alone!) Created the music, recorded my wife and I for the voices. Then I ran the switching/video for the conference and got to roll it myself. Got a standing ovation from the audience! :D My website is down and so I've lost a place to host it for now.

Why reduce the size of your tube? Just leave it at size and fly your cam thru.

Sounds so easy.... I have yet to get it to work, but... I have been busy at work alot, and have multiple different OS's to deal with...

Nice image! Maybe if you doubled the resolution and then downrezzed you would get a better effect around the lightning?

As far as I can tell, you never added the file to the message. Did you rename it to '.jpg' before browsing to it? I think the upload failed since I see nothing there. Try again now that your file is changed to .jpg.

Couldn't you create different scetions of the wolf having seperate AGrows? Then you could have seperate shaders for the seperate AGrows sections to have the different color schemes.

Are you using a 'realistic sky' for the background? Maybe your 'ground' setting in the properties panel is setting the ground above Z=0 so then your cup sitting on 0 is below the ground. Check your settings in the scene panel. If this is ok, how about posting the file here? Or some screenshots?

You can also use the drop-down in the camera view and choose 'Reset camera' to get it back to the default position if you've lost track of where you are.

I've tried a couple as well... hard to get 'em to fit my setups, but I'm still experimenting with them. They don't bother more then an email or 2 every month. I'm gonna continue using them. :D