GK - Not you, it was I who confused the two.

Captain - that sound's great.  Are you saying that if I use background and simply open an equirectangular image, it will work as if I were in the center of a sphere?  If so, how does one adjust lighting of the background?

Does this work for stereographic images?

Klebnor

GK:

If the background feature properly uses an equirectangular image, then this would be great.  In my experience with this function, it only places a flat image file behind the render selection.  I can't even pan around the image (unless there's something I don't know).

The envirosphere allows one to pan around while providing an undistorted background through 360 degrees.  I am unable to reproduce this with background.

Brian - I tried playing with a sphere primitive - but couldn't resize.  Can you make this primitive large enough so that the interior is useful, say 1000 ft in diameter?  Also, did you use a spherical or equirectangular image - the first render appears distorted.  Is this image incorporated in a shader which you applied to the sphere?  If so, did you put it in the color channel?

I will post some screen shots as soon as I can.  I am looking for very large images (2 to 10 MB) as the smaller files don't render well due to lack of detail.

Thanks all, I'm still trying to make this work to my satisfaction.

Klebnor

Thanks, all.

I tried bagginsbill's sphere and had to do some modification, but it works well.

I first scaled it down physically as it was huge and would take a huge image to get any detail at all on the texture map.  I made it a 700' diameter sphere.

Next I had to resize the equirectangular photos I had collected from flickr to get a good background image.

I put the sphere at origin, and put a bulb at origin, lighting only the shere.  I used a distant bulb oriented as the sun is in the image.  I didn't use a sun light, as I don't want to load a sky in my scene - the sky is on the sphere.

I then put a terrain through the sphere, replicated trees on the terrain and put a building at the origin.  I can pan all around and through the building and the background constantly changes, but stays realistic in detail and orientation.

Pretty cool.

Klebnor

GK,

It's not a product, it's a freebie created by Bagginsbill, and it's on his freebies site.  It was made for Poser, and it's apparently a globe with a diameter of 750 ft on which a equirectangular photo can be superimposed so that a camera at the origin can rotate in all directions and record the background.  It seems an excellent way to provide a backdrop for rendering.  I'm just not sure it works in Carrara.

I intend to test it tonight, but was hoping someone else had tried it.

The link is at:

sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff

Klebnor

Ben:

Thanks for the quick reply.

I think you will find Carrara integration a challenge as it uses an internal browser which finds poser content and allows it to be imported by click and drop into a scene.  If it could be done, this would be great!

I get the group thing - the big drop down just seemed pretty useless with the character groups that were auto imported.

I do have to reiterate one concern regarding keywords.  You said:

Quote -
So you really don't want to manually add a Keyword to a Folder, you just want make sure the important words (or sets of words) from that Folder's Name are listed as Keywords.PZDB will do the rest.  (Also we will be trying to simplify the interface for adding and removing Groups and Keywords from Items Folders etc.)

I have to assume the group (rather than search) is your key navigation prompt.  I was using the search function.  For example, I have several texture sets for the V4 basicwear.  Some do not have any indication of this product in their file or folder names.  Searching for "basic" "wear" and "basicwear" do not retrieve them.  If I open a folder containing such textures and add the keyword "basicwear" to all items in the folder, then these textures come up under poses when I search for basicwear.  Are you saying that your solution would be to create a group called "basicwear", search for this keyword and add the search to the group, then go out and find other items without the right key words and add them to the group?

Thanks again, and I am very impressed with your adaptation of the sql search routines of access to search, index and retrieve content.  Genius really!

Klebnor von Hinter

Ben:

I would like to use PzDB with Carrara.  I know that I won't be able to launch items into Carrara, but it could still be very useful for finding content, then opening it the normal way.  This is somewhat crippled because the field for the item's path is so small that the full path never fits, requiring me to enter the text with the cursor and arrow to the left to reveal the path.  It would be helpful if you had either:

a) a window which displayed the full path when moused over

or

b) a right click pop up tooltip showing the full path

If there's another way to see it, let me know.

Also, it seems that adding a keyword to a folder is one of the most common tasks to ensure that a search finds an item (for example, a set of poses with mat files for an object which were poorly named and do not immediately index to the character object).  In this case, one must use "add keyword", then select entire folder, then type in the keyword.   Couldn't this common task be simplified, for example - right click on a current keyword in the current item pane could have an option to "apply keyword to current folder".  This would help tremendously.  Again, if there's a shortcut I've missed, please let me know.

i still don't understand groups.  Is there a drop down, or other way to access a group once it's created?

Otherwise, after one session of playing with the test version, I have to say this is one of the most impressive poser utilities I've ever seen.

Regards,

Klebnor

Apollo ... downloaded him, tried him, deleted him.

Difficult to work with, at best.

Problematic posing.

No aftermarket support.

Don't know about dogs - never had one.  We do have three cats.  One keeps the house clear of all manner of vermin - even plucked a bat out of the air (launched off the coffee table).  The second one announces visitors by running full speed down the hall and through the kitchen - before the bell in rung.  The third one takes out the trash, mows the lawn, does all the shopping, trims our toenails, and does our taxes.

He's a keeper.

Quote -
This bears to be repeated.  Again, I don't ask that you respect the man at all.  Please respect your fellow forumites.  Your point of view has been defended many times in recent history, David, I can't understand why you would wish that others' voices be silenced.

Stating a contrary view should not be conflated with wishing to silence others.  Perhaps David added a bit of balance.  He certainly based his concern on facts.

"The word is not the thing, the map is not the territory, the symbol is not the thing symbolized"  S. I. Hayakawa

After much practice, my sage advice:

Start with FBM, dial voluptuous down to between -4 and -6.  This affects the full body, but results in much more realism.  This is critical - starting any other way will yield unrealistic results.  If you don't like the overall shape, change glutes, thighs, arms, whatever - separately.

Now adjust breasts, dial 'size' and 'large' down until you like the overall size.

Fix the distortions (they will be there) as best you can with other adjustments - among the helpful are diameter, cleavage, straight out, perk and ariole out.  Natural can also be helpful - use it in the negative direction to fix the bottom shape.

This is the only way I have found to achieve small realism.

I miss Ed McMahon.

Crouching Tiger:

The floor looks great!  The walls, with numbered doors also look excellent.

One thing I would like to see - the lights in the ceiling should be a separate group (or individual objects which can be grouped).  In Carrara, a great trick is to shine a distant light from below the entire model and make it illuminate only the lights.  They must be separate for this to work.  If they are part of the roof, the entire roof is illuminated.  On a big building like this it saves a ton of time, not to mention the memory overhead of individual lights.  One distant light from above, illuminating all but the ceiling and lights, lights the scene as though all the roof lights were on.  I can't tell you how many models I've cursed because the embedded lights are part of one big ceiling panel, and the only way to make it look realistic is to put a spot under each light - AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

BTW, the same goes for the embedded floor lights (I assume that's what the blue things are).  If they could be illuminated together, it would be very helpful (the blue light panels should be separate objects, grouped or not)  If the blue panels took a common shader, I could make them all glow in one step with Carrara - very cool!

I'm already planning to drop a couple of fueling lines from the ceiling on a rotating boom.  Just a thought.

Klebnor

Really.

GC must be turned on, and can be set.  It is effective.

There is no reason to leave the Poser lights in a scene in Carrara.  The Carrara lights allow much more tuning and realism - one should get used to stripping out the Poser lights and starting from scratch.

One hint it took me a while to realize - when you spend time developing excellent lighting for a scene you can easily group the lighting, then place the group in a master group with your scene objects.  This master group can then be saved as an object in the Carrara browser.  When you want to use it again, you can just pull it out of the browser and there it is - fixed shaders, lights and all.

Klebnor

Absolutely right!  In fact, I have seen many dial up to 500%, and they look ridiculous.

Carrara could benefit from a global bump adjust which would set all bumps to a certain number, of give the option to adjust all by an input percentage (say 10%).  This would allow one to to a global adjustment, and then go back and do individual adjustments as necessary.

Klebnor