Hi Mike, The discount only works on plugin buy at the same moment. But if you're planning to buy Primivol, you might want to wait for the end of the week: there will be a new cheap plugin (about 10$) that can swap objects (as it was discussed in this forum: http://www.inagoni.com/forum_viewtopic.php?7.25 ). If you need such plugin, buying it will give you a discount on Primivol too. Julien

Hi, I will work on a demo version soon. I just need to figure out what should be limited and what shouldn't. To animate the primitives, you can usually just animate the Z coordinate of the 3D shape: it will give the effect of a rising vapor. There should be some tutorial in the next 3DXtract. About the price, you can already buy Deeper, Baker, Primivol and Replica at a discount price. Each time a plugin is bought, you're elligible for a discount on all the other one. To get the greatest discount, buy the cheappest one first. For these 4 for example, it would be 15+29+29+39=112$ when buying Deeper first. I think a discount is more flexible than a bundle: every new plugin will benefit from this discount, and you can just buy the one you want or need.

This new volume primitives interact with the ligh. But due to a Carrara limitation, they just interact with distant lights (this include distant, sun and moon lights). In conterpart, the rendering times are kept very low. And the shadow color and intensity are fully editable, so even with a brigth lighting, it's possible to have light shadows (or the oposite).

It's on a 1.8GHz laptop. It should be twice faster on a recent desktop machine. The figures I gave are from the beta version and can change. I just did another render of a single frame of this movie, and it took 12 sec. Julien

they render quite fast. The fire movie I added in inagoni forum rendered in 23 min for 4 seconds. That's less than 15 sec per image.

It depends how well it goes. I'm currently testing the animation, and if everything works fine, it should be available sometime this week.

If you've got some image or animation you can show, I'd like to it.

No, but finding a domain name was. :)

You should try to open and compile one of the shader examples, it's the easiest part to start plug-ins. The examples should compile with VC++ 6 without any modification to do. One thing is required though, it's the Rez files. The cookbook explains how you can get them. And if you can't, I can send them. And you may need to modify the CopyMCX.bat file to automaticaly copy the new files in your extension folder. But that's the only thing to do as I remember.

Nice image, glad to see that the fix for C3 works.

Send me the file at julien_chaplier@yahoo.com, I'll check it. I need to know where the problem is coming from. And I had trouble downloading the new file from the website, the wrong one was in the internet cache and I needed to erased it to get the new one. Plus it's a C4 file, I'm not sure you can open it with C3.

A piece of the file was missing, I uploaded it again, this time it's complete.

The tutorial is updated, let me know if the shaders work fine

The scaling is relative to the hotpoint, so it's really important to place it at the base of the tree. But if this is done, the trees shouldn't be elevated over the ground. They can look elevated in the real time rendering because the terrain use a lighter version of its mesh to be displayed, but the final rendering should be fine. Can you send me your file before the replication is done and the parameters you used if you still have a problem, I'll look at it. And I'll update the tutorial this week end and put the scene and the shader available for download.

Here's something I forgot to do: the tutorial was made with a beta version. In the release, the build-in noise has a greater amplitude than before, so to reproduce the tutorial, the scaling values should be lower to about half of the displayed values. I'll update the screenshot later. For the grayscale shader, you can use a Carrara environment shader, or a vertical gradient. The one I used is in the Veloute plug-in.