Thanks!

Thanks! I've only had a chance to glance at it, but the bit about the horses does seem to be what I'm looking for!

Chipp, my manual appears to end on page 475! In any case, I searched for "varying" and "variable" within the text, and came up with some interesting ideas, but none that would seem to do what I'm trying. At least as far as I can tell, anyway; I'm no chimp, but I do have a problem with processing manual-speak into real-world results.

What I'm going for, in the end, is a group of seated theatre patrons. I'm trying to vary the color of their shirts so they don't look like clones. I could go Jackie's route and save a variety of figures as .vobs and just place those randomly in the seats, but I was wondering if there's a function-related way of doing it.

Thanks for replying!

YouTube's jitteriness (at least on my connection) is making it hard for me to see the exact jump you're talking about, but my first question would be whether you've assigned the "helicopter" motion type to your camera. I've experienced bumps like the one you describe when I've used that setting. I haven't figured out how to fix it, but as a first step toward solving your problem, try switching the motion type to something else.

Thanks!

I just set the plane as the tracked parent for a stationary camera and then moved the plane past. I'm still struggling with more complicated moves than that!

I just had a similar problem solved for me by Mazak when he pointed me to this thread.

Does your cactus come from Poser, by chance?

Yes, it was imported from Poser...

Your solution from the other thread appears to have worked! Thanks a million!

Hmm. Turns out everything was on Object Standard. Any other ideas?

I'll give it a shot. Thanks!

You can rant all you want about religious nuts and puritanical politicians, but you probably haven't considered the whole issue until you've mentioned greedy lawyers.

As a disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, I don't play one on TV, and I am not privy to the workings and thoughts  of Bondware's management or legal departments.

A quick story that I hope will make some sense. Years ago I worked at a printing company. We had a lot of customers of varying types throughout the country. We weren't having a very good quarter, and one of our salesmen, who existed solely on commission, brought in a prospect who published soft core... well, porn is too strong a term; I saw samples, and I'd say the content probably wasn't much worse than the pinups here. However, I was forced to oppose --rather vigorously-- our taking this client on, even though the money looked good. Why? Because under state law at the time (I don't know whether it's changed; I just know that I changed jobs!), I could personally be named in a lawsuit for sexual harrassment if another client happened to walk into my office as I was preparing the soft-core files for printing and got offended at it. I could get into legal hot water, my employer could get into legal hot water, and the soft-core client could get into legal hot water. It wasn't worth the short-term gain, and I eventually prevailed --but not before hearing all the arguments I'm reading in these threads: "What are you, a puritan?" "It's a freedom of speech issue!" "Do nipples scare you?"

Bondware is a company. Bondware likely has a legal department. Bondware's lawyers have likely told Bondware that all the nudity filters in the world won't protect them from an ambulance chaser who sees a chance to make a buck. Yeah, we all know you shouldn't look at unfiltered Renderosity galleries at work, even during lunch. We also all know people do it anyway. The lawyers do, too. The employee would be at risk (no problem; his fault), his employer would be at risk (no problem; they employed an idiot), but the deep-pockets theory of legal wrangling in this country means that even Bondware would be at risk if someone thought there might be some money in it. Even though Bondware would likely win any such challenges, the damage to their bank account and reputation probably make it worth it for their lawyers to dictate that all thumbnails be G-Rated, period. Yes, everyone's still at risk if the user is looking at the full-size nude image when someone walks in and sees a chance to put their kid through college, but the thumbnail policy limits everyone's, um, exposure. We as users can live with that or go somewhere else.

I can't say with any authority that that's Bondware's official position, but as a person who's been in discussions like this at the company level, I bet the lawyers have been involved. Blaming it on individuals who can't handle nudity is convenient, but probably not altogether accurate.

I bought a Fantom external a couple of years ago (maybe even from newegg), and I have no complaints.

For this image, I downloaded the demo version of Google Sketchup Pro, then downloaded a couple dozen building models with photographic textures and exported them as 3DS models. Then I put together an ecosystem and voila!

Thanks! This will be perfect for a project I have in mind!

I've never done this on purpose, but I've noticed it in relation to violence, also. I'm pretty proud of the last six or seven images in my gallery and wish more people would have looked at them. That's life. What's telling, though, is that out of those six or seven images the two which are tagged as violent have tons more hits.

When I snap trees to land, I find myself having to lower them en masse into the ground just a bit more; Bryce seems to want to leave the roots exposed, and the profile looks unnatural. Maybe if you tried that, you'd be happier with the trees. It's also evident that you've got a single line of trees, or close to it, and it seems to my eye that your tree trunks should be in front of the branches of trees further down the back slope of the mountain. Does that make sense? I can't think of a better way to word it. Long story short, more trees! ;)