Actually I believe that the light must be at least at 1 and that should not have any effect on your scene. Oh, yeah, and you may want to turn off "Casts shadows" so there is no extraneous artifacts from the light... Ken

Saw La Jette in a film class long before 12 Monkeys came out. When I watched the beginning of it and saw it was based on it, I already knew how it was going to end... bummer, really, but it was an entertaining movie at least...
Ken

Message edited on: 01/19/2006 10:28

Some of us can't afford it... :) I simply use HDRIShop and Paint Shop Pro to do the editing... Ken

Attached Link: http://www.kenzden.com/tutorial/hdrtuto.htm

Try this if you're feeling adventurous. Written back when 4 came out and still works... gonna have to update to show how Carrara can be used to create an image with spherical camera, then port through HDRIShop... Ah, if I only had more time... Ken 

Welcome to the Dark side.... Muahahahahahahahahahaha! But seriously, I've been a Carrara user for a long time... It has supplanted my Bryce fixation, but I gotta see these boards if only to hear from some of the group... It has what I need... not that I don't dust off Bryce every now and again, but C5 now has a lot more to play with! Ken

Twisted, Carrara5 (Pro Version only) does support Poser characters, but NOT dynamic cloth support. Something they REALLY need to work on... Ken (Bryce lurker, but Carrara modeller... heh)

Swift3D is a flash creation program that allows you to create/use 3d models for a vector based flash animation. It seems to be quite powerful, and for those of us who model extensively in 3D, probably pretty intuitive. Per Electric Rain's site, Swift will allow import of DXF and 3ds files, so if Terragen can export them, then you can use them in Swift. Hope this helps! Ken

Smallworld, I tend to agree with trav in that Carrara will do some wierd things with tri'd meshes. For the most part if the polys are coplanar, then the algorithm will de-tri a good portion of the mesh and save you a lot of time. If, however your meshes are based upon a lot of splines then there may be a lot of manual clean-up to make it look right. I re-did some of my older meshes with the untriangulate command and one of them was based on a polyhedron to begin with. That one was a mess to clean as the co-planar faces were in areas that I didn't want to un-tri. I ended up re-doing the mesh, but before I did, the command had shaved the poly count by almost half! This is not to say that it won't work for you. Like trav said, demo it and see what it can do for you. Ken

GWeb,
When you create the half, you click on the Symmetry button. This will allow you to create a symmetrical duplicate of the object by plane, but don't stop there. You need to go to the properties panel and click the "Clone Off" button to turn on cloning (it will switch to "Clone"). This will allow the duplicate to be a clone and any changes done to the original will be reflected in the clone. Click the plane of symmetry and you're done!

Mark,
I've noticed that if I try to scale or move the whole object the clone does not follow or update... any ideas why, or is mine just being flakey?
Ken

Message edited on: 08/01/2005 10:39

I may just have to rewrite the tuto that I wrote for facial animations in the backroom (yeah, Kix, it's overdue!) The simple explanation is that you create the object that you want to morph in the vertex modeller. You select the polygons that you want to morph. There is a morph section that you use to create morph targets. Once in the morph area, you move the vertices/polygons to the desired form and it creates a slider using that position as the final target. It's easier to show than explain... Check the e-manual/help for morph targets and be on the look out for a tutorial to be coming soon (God and time-willing....) Ken

Carrara only recognizes one root per skeleton. This means that you can only really attach one skeleton per object/group. You can however build the facial structure off the main group to the head and use it to animate the face. For most of what I do I usually make the gross movements of the head and face off the skeleton and associate all the vertices in the head to the bone. Before doing this, though, I usually build in morphs for the face in the vertex modeller (C4Pro only). That way I can animate expressions on a separate level. As to parenting an object to the hand (gun or sword), one method is to use 2 objects: One parented to the hand in the hierarchy, and one free moving. By turning on/off "visible" in the properites, I can make it look like I'm picking up said object. It's a bit of a trick to get it right, but it does work. Hope this helps! Ken

For someone on a budget, I'd recommend looking into ZBrush. I believe it's under a 1000 and does modelling like painting and sculpting. Unfortunately I don't have the cash to spare to buy it my self (too many obligations), but you might wanna check up on it. Good luck Ken

For those following this thread, I've figured out what I need to do. The attached image (sorry for the size and compression), shows what I've been trying to accomplish. It took some experimentation, but I've come to realize the errors of my ways. In this case the ability of C4 to do realistic landscapes in many resolutions. The image has 3 terrain masters, 5 terrain objects, and 2 fog objects of different colors. The sky is a spherical background images made in C4 and rendered to 2048x1024 (a lot faster to render than trying to get the sky AND the terrains together). The terrains are res'd at 2049 (on the left) with the applied textures, and I rendered them at 257 (on the right) and they looked almost identical. So what I'm left with is the knowledge that terrains put together can be at low res then increased depending on what type of POV you want. What's the outcome? Just trying to see what I can do. Ken 

Sardtok, Knew that one, but is there a way to generate tilable terrains. I know that I can fudge them together with the zero edge, I can even port the greyscale maps into PS/PSP and blend them together. Just seeing if anyone knew if C4 could make them without my having to do some harsh editing. As for the texture, that's easy... the same generic terrain texture will be used as a base and any additional objects will have some variation of it (for some diversity, of course). Ken

BT, Good to see ya in the carrara forums! The AGrooves maps according to whatever mapping mode you use, so anything you do would be placed on the model in that manner. A picture would be helpful, but we can try to work it through without one. In mapping a primative, the AGr map will map according to the AGr shader. If you do a cube and set the shader to cubic front face, only the front face will be mapped. Personally, if I do a brick wall, I usually use an AGr primative plane and just the standard Multi-channel settings. This will displace the plane to the brick work that I need. If I need more brick, I tile the image and tweak it to whatever number I need. Problem with that is that you have to change the resolution of the AGr settings to something higher than the default. That can result in slightly (or MAJOR if it's above 512) higher render times. In a UV mapped model (parametric is usually default, correct me if I'm wrong guys) you can use the UV map as the displacement map. If you are bricking a UV building, say, then you can map the specific walls with just the number of bricks you need. You will, however, have to increase the rez slightly to compensate and get a cleaner displace. I could be totally off-base, and I know it's Monday morning, so the neurons aren't firing fully. If anyone can clarify on what I'm trying to say, I'm easy (going that is). Ken