I rendered all of them with GI. But because each only had one light source, they moved quickly.

thanks kix, it's just the preset interior white gloss texture modified a bit. you know, like better bump map n' stuff. by the way, litst, the scale thing worked. thank you. i'm rendering it in multiple passes on my machine at home right now, so i'll post it when it's done. -pix

thank you so much for the prompt advice. i'll give it a try. -pix

Since you don't have a second processor, I would only go to Jaguar on that machine if Carrara is unstable on OS9. I've had really good luck with the patched version on Jaguar, as long as I avoid the texture room. I've tried Jaguar on a machines that bracket yours in speed. 8.6 or 9.x will be much more responsive just on an OS level for these slower machines. But I have to admit that I use Jaguar on them because I just can't work in the old systems after tasting the good stuff.

can you post the url so we don't have to hunt it down ourselves? i'm very lazy these days. thanks

yes. a network render engine would be very useful.

if you want that portion of the curtain to be illuminated by the light from outside, you could always use a t-map that has some glow properties in the area that would be affected. if you're animating, you could use a movie for the t-map.

hey, i'm just happy that they got the patches out so i can use it with 10.2. incidentally, did any one notice that it seems if you updated to 10.2.1 it took care of the dock / menubar application switching problem as well as the copying and duplicating crash that i ranted about a month or so back?

i've been playing around with the patched version, and i still get sporadic crashes (texture room only so far). so i hope that they keep improving stability. but i have to give them credit. it is more stable than 1.1, which had me hitting apple-S after every change i made.

as far as new features that would be great, how 'bout antialiased alpha channels. i'm tired of rendering at 3 times the size i intend to display at just so i can get smooth alphas.

also more options for which channels are rendered would be nice (you know color / bump / transparency... i just want automated support for rendering in layers)

thanks,

now, you can completely ignore this if you want 'cause this thread is getting huge, but i've installed jaguar on a bunch of different macs now and have a better frame of reference as to different speeds of different graphics boards on different machines.

anyway...
the G4 dual 1Ghz with nVidia Ti 128 is plenty fast, but the ATI tv 32 i have in the PCI slot so I can run my second CRT blows. It is much slower at refreshing the screen just in the operating system.

the G4 400 with AGP2x ATI 16MB is also almost fast enough.

and even the G3 266 with onboard 2MB ATI is surprisingly fast (although it poops out at 1152x870). But the 16MB iXmicro PCI card I have in this machine is slower than snails. Unfortunately I need to use it as my main monitor card because I have to have at least 1280x1024.

Basically, once you get over the 16/32 hurdle, as long as you have AGP, I think you should be quite satisfied. The speed benefits of running both monitors off of the AGP far outway anything a PCI board could do. ( I have no idea how this would all hold up for gaming, since i don't do it) and lastly, all the PCI boards i used are old, so it's not really a fair comparison becuase the processors are probably slower on them than their AGP counterparts.

-pix

Thanks Eric, But that brings up more questions... If the extra RAM on the graphics card only helps display, what kind of benefits are we talking about? Is this increased frame rate in games/ movie playback, smoother scrolling, and support for higher resolutions? I've also heard that Jaguar was going to offload all of the operating system graphics to the video card. so in that sense, a better video card would mean a smoother moving UI, right? Lastly, what about cards with the dual monitor support. Say you've got 2 displays running off an ATI 9000 with 64MB of RAM. Basically that's 32 per display. would there be an advantage to buying a PCI graphics board for one of the displays so that you could have the AGP and full 64megs dedicated to your main monitor? thanks again for the previous info, and thanks in advance for any more info you have. -pix

although, doesn't the amount of memory on the card affect how much texture-map information can be stored on the card. the idea being that the more you can store on the card, the fewer times you have to access the hard drive and system ram which should yield faster render times? please correct me if i'm wrong. -pix

at the risk of sounding like a total bonehead...

how do you call up the emoticons? -pix

if you already have a licensed copy of C1.1, you might want to consider upgrading to C2. i've used C2 on a bunch of different machines, (G4 400Mhz, G4 MP 1Ghz, P4 1Ghz, and P3 550Mhz) and found it worked like a charm on PC's with XP

The openGL integration seems to be stronger on PCs. For example, i had an ATI Mobility w/16Megs of RAM and it was moving the scenes around just as fast if not faster than my MP mac at work with the nVidia Ti 4600 w/128 Megs. Go figure. Even the P3 550 which has a lousy integrated video card was competative with the mac.

The mac was a wee bit faster at rendering (this was before the patch, so it's probably faster after that. i still haven't had time to test, though) anyway, since it has two processors, it could chew through big renders.

but getting to what means the most to you... stability.... i noticed that C2 worked like a charm on both PC's and they had winXP pro. in fact for the week that i was using the P4, i don't think i crashed once.

there is such an immense gap between the stability of C2 on PC's to that on Mac (let me just say that i didn't do too much work with C2 before getting a machine with Jaguar, and this may be a large part of the problem)

anyway, the PC seems far more suited for scene building because of smoother interactive render, where as i like my mac for rendering and texture building, postprocessing and editing.

let me finish by saying that C2 was so nice on the PC, i will probably be buying a cheap dell in a month or two just to build scenes and animate on.

hope this overgrown mess helps. a bit.

-pix

Well I tried my own advice... I tried re-installing X on my MP mac only to find out that while 10.1.5 works, previous versions do not work. And my Installer CD is for 10.1. So I tried booting up in 9.2.2 to use Carrara. Nope. Can't even open the app. I guess tomorrow, I'll bring in the Carrara 1.1 intstaller and put it on my computer. I suppose that if I can atleast run in 9.2.2 or in Classic, that I can get work done. Forget my rotting second processor. I'm getting close to the end of my rope with this program though. Maybe I just need to buy a PC. It worked great on the PC I tried it on. OK. My rant is over. Thanks for all the help, guys. I'll work something out I suppose. -Scott