If anyone is interested in a function like this and you're a Shaders Plus customer, drop me a line off list. I have a beta Shaders Plus that I can share that does this. It's a new lighting model where you can control the specular and diffuse contribution of each light and adjust the GI and ambient light.

Regards,

In the Top Shader select Complex Shaders->Layers List. This will create a shader where you can layer on effects. There will be a base shader and underneath that is a plus button where you can add layers. The layers can have different shapes and you can further refine it with an Opacity Mask.

Regards,

Or a Layers List.

Many ways in Carrara.

Good luck,

You must be selecting a slot that allows topmost shaders and normal channel shaders. You're seeing the groups of Enhance:C top most shaders (stuff that works like multichannel or layers) and the stuff that works at the channel level (things that work like multiply and color).

Regards,

Hi Sue,

Got your message and sent a reply.

Regards,

Quote -  I'm not here to complain, but it seems to me that creative, dynamic plugins have not been coming out as fast as they once were

...

I'm just thinking and asking aloud.  Creds to all the developers out there, my fist part of the this post is just to get feedback on the climate of plugins - not to complain.
R

You're absolutely right, but from a DCG perspective things are starting to ramp back up again.

Toon! Pro is deep in a big update, some of which I've shown off in one of the threads at the DAZ forums. Shading domain level control of lines, colors, etc., massive decrease in memory usage, better management of Cell shading especially for DAZ style content, and a few other things.

Anything Goos got its update this weekend. The quick turn around was actually due to some of the work I had finished on the Toon! Pro update. One of the shared tools I use in TP and AGoos had recently been updated to support the very thing I needed to help with Shonner's request. It's always fun to leverage code that way.

There are two new Shaders Plus tools in the can, I just need to get around to posting them to the beta testers for some validation.

And finally, I've started design work on a new bundle of shader operators which will probably be named More Shader Ops, Shader Ops Too, Shader Ops Reloaded, or something along those lines.

Regards,

Quote - Eric: Yes I would be very interested in seeing how you fair with the 8 cores and Carrara...

It came in yesterday and I have a few things to report. Under Carrara 6.03 OSX, it does suffer the core problem. Rendering is awful, but I understand that problem is corrected for the next patch.

Since Vista doesn't have the current multicore problem I did a few performance tests there. Rendering, it's 6.6 times faster than my 2ghz MacBook Pro and 7.8 times faster than my dual 3ghz Xeon.  I tried running the benchmark mentioned on this page forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php and it took 1 minute 24 seconds while there was something installing in the background. This thing is a beast.

Last night I was gaming with some friends on WoW (OSX) and the CPU was sitting at 9-10% utilization.

A few other observations:

it's wicked quiet. I can't hear the fans with it under my desk. Hard drive is pretty noisy (I got the default 320 gig) and it's much louder than the pair of seagates I have in a USB enclosure. The optical drive is horrendous, noisy and flimsy.

I'm not a Hexagon guy so really can't speak to it's performance there.

I don't have it yet (mid Feb since I ordered the upgraded video card) so can't really give feedback on Carrara and cores. I'd be happy to do some benchmarking when it arrives.

I'll probably pick up another 4gig after I get it, so 6 total. That should be enough to run a VM with 2 gig and still have plenty for the host OS. Right now I develop in a VM with 768meg, leaving 1.25 gig for OSX and find that have to keep nearly everything off for it to run well. RAM limits are really my biggest problem at the moment and the laptop is 2gig max.

Vista because I don't have it in house yet so don't really have that base covered in terms of testing and support.

Regards,

Quote - Get a Mac, it will still run Windows if you need it. :)

That actually is the new machine. I finally retired the venerable dual 800 G4 desktop and I'm replacing it with one of the new Mac Pros. I'm currently running bootcamp/fusion on my laptop and want to do the same thing with the desktop. After googling around a bit, I got the answer I needed. Fusion supports x64, and you can get x64 to run on bootcamp, but fusion won't run the bootcamp of x64 so Vista 32 it is.

Thanks all for the feedback.

Regards,

Funny enough, based on a request from another Carrara user, I created a new lighting model last night that does exactly that.

How to use it in the Texture room.

What it looks like in the render. The one sphere and the front face of the spline object have the shadows turned down.

It will be part of the next update to Shaders Plus. Right now it's a simple adjust of the shadow intensity.

Something that just turns of shadows completely can be faster and/or there could be an option to tweak the shadow's color. Any thoughts on those other options? Is that something you'd like to see?

Thanks,

Jones,

Does removing the font work differently than disabling it? Everything is still disabled, still no menus. Tried the Helvetica and Font Book wouldn't let me disable it. I'll try deleting the fonts at the next opportunity, but that's not really a good solution either. Removing the most used sans seriff fonts...

I know C6 is out, but I think DAZ really ought to step up and fix this one, especially after just offering C5 free with the magazine.

Regards,

Dex,

There's one big issue with C5 and Leopard that pretty much makes it unusable if it hits you. None of the text works. Menus, labels, everything is blank.

I've gotten some temporary help by disabling Arial fonts in font manager, but then the problem reappears at the next reboot.

Regards,

No clue then.

Good luck.

Did you have the object you were working on selected in the Assemble room when you changed to the Modeling room?