Thank you again for your help.

Here is my current predicament: I have a rather unusual scene in mind, where only half of the environment seen through the camera is fully lit (as in daylight), while the other half is in the darkness.

I could do it by obscuring the light with something invisible, but the scene has some glass and water and other transparent things, so that doesn't help.

I could also try to limit the range of the lights I'm using, but the best way I know how to do daylight is through distant lights. I might need to go down this road, though.

I could also render it twice, but the scene is complex and my compositiing skills aren't the best. I was also pondering a possibility of a short animation, which with double renders is not going to be possible.

Wow. Thank you! What an interesting round about way... It wouldn't have occured to me ever...

Unfortunately, this brings me back to the necessity to render my scene twice (since I have transparencies, which need to render properly as such.) Or is there another way around this too?

Another possible alternative: what is a best way to immitate the distant light while using something which has a limited distance range? The spots have an obvious dispercion point, at least within manageable distances. While the whole benefit of the distant light is the parallel direction of rays. Is there a way to fake it?

For me it's been in the "Website is offline" stage since Monday.... Didn't get through even once... Still at it. And all of the site is like that: store, forums, help center, everything.

If someone does see the site and can get through, please make DAZ aware of this issue. If some people can get through and others cannot, they might not be aware of the problem.

Fantastic animations! You do amazing things with Carrara. Very impressive!

Thankyou! They look cool!

It'snot directly related to the tutorial, but I wanted to ask you as the Forum Coordinator: what happened to the "Backroom" link on top? Right now the page is not found...

Wow! Very impressive. I wonder what's the size of your file. Even with minimized shaders it must be huge.

But I am also wondering about replicators: I see you are using some (judging by bounding boxes in fly through), but are the smaller models there in instances or are they also replicated all over? I wonder whether it would improve the time/storage/memory to use lots of distribution maps and replicators with few actual instances, or whether with really low poly models it's actually resource-cheaper to use them instead of the maps?

Great bot model. Do you plan on creating animations with it? If so, please share the results with us. I'd love to see this model in action.

So, I was going to model a pipe. And I did, but it's not nearly as nice as I intended it to be, and I keep thinking that I am actually doing it wrong.

I started in the spline modeler with a circle section and created a path that looked roughly like a pipe in profile. Then I converted the horrid shape that was thus created into the vertex modeler, removed extra (triangular and coplanar) edges and fiddled with the shape by hand to beat it into something actually resembling a pipe. With some heavy smoothing it now kinda sorta does...

But there must be a better way to do this, because what I did is in no way a good modeling technique. I kept trying to find a way to use a path in the vertex modeler to get some extrusion along it, but again, I must have been doing it wrong because that just didn't want to happen. I got some really funny shapes with the lathe tool, but that's no surprise, since that tool was never intended for the curved objects like the pipe.

So, is there a better way of doing this? and where are we uploading the objects for others to look at and use?

Thank you for your patience and help.

Carrara already renders out object outlines (Object Index layer) and Dispance to camera (Depth layer), but when saved into the single photoshop file, they become channels/masks, not layers. So if you need them and Elements don't work with those(I don't use Elements, so I don't know), just render them as external (not embedded) layers and then reintroduce them back from inside your Photoshop.

I use the depth channel all the tame for adding DOF in post using Photoshop Lens Blur (I don't know whether Elements has it).

I also use the separate reflections layer to adjust intensity of and/or blur reflections.

Same with glow. I don't like how carrara handles rendering glow effects, so I just render glow as a separate layer then duplicate it, blur it and get instant atmospheric glow around all the objects which had glow in the shaders.

There are many more uses. These are the ones I use almost all the time, so they are the ones which came to mind first.

Thank you for your help and for pointing me in the right direction!

Thank you, Xerxes0002 and GKDantas.

GKDantas, do I understand correctly, the the PFhoe .ma (Maya) export will work just as well with V2C, as if it ware generated by Voodoo?

And what about VooDoo itself? Is it significantly worse than PFhoe?

Thank you again for your help!

Well deserved. His gallery is an inspiring collection of art.

Congratulations, Sabotssnake!

Welcome! :)

Mark,

Thnak you!

It's even much simpler than I thought it would be. Amazing. Thank you!

I miss your Carrara Dark Arts :). I think your plug-in expertise would make great material for that section.

Thank you again for the scene!

Antara.

Mark, this is wonderful!

Please share how you've done it :). I have Shaders Plus and I'd love to be able to replicate this effect. (And maybe learn a bit or 2 about using the plug-in more).

I love SCG plug-ins, but one of the problems I often have with them is lack of good illustrations with examples of how each function works and what it could be used for.