me too. i'm not sure if its a bug in the program or if i'm missing something obvious about custom joints, but i avoid them because they don't seem to stay defined. -scott

another solution that i've heard of, but never tried, is to make a shadow object. this just means that you determine how your shadow would look and make it in geometry. you could probably convert your text to a vertex object and then smoosh it flat in the modeling room. then make the shader a dark color. this technique is used in video games so that the makers can render without calculating shadows. unfortunately, this probably won't work too well if the surface was anything other than a flat plane. good luck with your problem. -scott

thanks for all the comments everyone, and
congratulations to TOXE!

i was planning to post information about my
process if i won. so i suppose this is close
enough. i think i'll display this all on my
website and supply the link here on the forum.
please give me about a week to get my many
test renders organized into a coherent
presentation.

i'll happily field answers to any questions, too.

-scott

Attached Link: http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/exchange-glance/Y02Y0876095Y9044323/qid=1017791657/sr=1-1/102-4

yes, i've also heard that when cararra 2 comes out
there will no longer be upgrade offers from rds and
infini-d. so i would buy now.

the price to upgrade now is around $150. when cararra
2 comes out it will probably also cost about $150 to
upgrade from version 1.

therefore, your total cost is around $300, which is still
cheaper than having to buy version 2 for the full price
($400). did all that make sense?

anyway, as far as how easy it is to pick up cararra? i've
heard that it is fairly similar to rds in theory. yes it has a
different interface, but you'll adjust quickly.

i got the program in december. i had done very very
little 3-D art before owning cararra. i sat down and read
the manual cover to cover trying everything that it
covered. it is an easy to read manual and it only took
about a month to finish.

if you figure that i didn't know what i was doing when i
began, and take a look at what i'm doing now, i think it
proves that cararra is easy to learn.

also, i would recommend the book "digital lighting and
rendering" by jeremy birn. it bridged the gap between
learning the software and learning good lighting
principles. the book is written to platform and software
inspecific, so it will benefit users of any software
package. see the attached link to get the book from
amazon.

ok i'm off my soap box. sorry that i rambled. i hope that
some of it was useful.

-scott

i like stopping by the member's gallery every once in a while, so i don't favor the idea of eliminating it all together, but i would like to see it renamed. i don't care whether it be listed with the art galleries or in the side bar, but definitely rename it. -scott

neat pic. do you plan to animate it? what is a visual information craftsman? and what types of things do they do in the air force?

-scott

hi max, i was having the same problem. everything looks great when you first place the model, and the next time you open the file, no textures. i solved the problem by adding my textures to the browser. i'm not sure if doing this before saving your model to the browser has any impact or not. but i do the textures first, then the model. seems to work. all my shaders have specific names, so i don't know if that is an issue. -scott

yeah, i already knew about the limitations of shadow-mapped soft shadows. fortunately, i won't need to focus on the shadows that my transparent objects are casting. also, for the final image, i'm planning on rendering in several passes. i'm thinking about rendering one pass of the fluoresecent with raytraced shadows, another with soft and tweaking as needed in photoshop. we'll see. -scott

i played a bit with the settings you gave, litst. seems your machine is about 3 times faster than mine. sigh.

anyway, the shadows still band a bit. i suppose adding more segments and facets will solve this problem, but that will also slow down rendering.

the final image will have a lot of transparency and reflection, so i'm probably going to go with bulbs.

i tried a row of 7 bulbs, but the highlight begin to separate. back to the string of 40 and kix's idea of turning the fall off to 100. this did a decent job of reducing the light cast on the far wall.

i think i'm going to experiment more in that direction.

thanks out to both of you for giving me input on this.

-scott

hi litst,

thanks for the advice. i actually want to maintain a highlight on the wall and other surfaces. i want the highlight to be the same shape as the light source (as it would be in real life).

since you've done quite a bit of playing with environment lights, do you have any input as to why my first image had such a strange shadow. as i said before, i'm not gonna use EL for this image, but i'm interested in knowing more about it since i hope to one day get a better computer.

thanks again for your input.

-scott

Attached Link: http://www.eovia.com

Kaliman, i think that carrara can recognize more decimal places than that, but after a while it is kind of pointless. one other thought on your problem with light leaking... i found this out while working with terrain. objects planted in terrain "hover" when rendered with the hybrid renderer. actually the terrain renders out at a lower altitude. switching to the raytracer or converting the terrain to a vertex object solves the problem, but in previous discussions, litst mentioned that all objects have a degree of "hover" when using the hybrid renderer. he can probably explain this all more elegantly. but if you align the hot points and still get "light bleed" just try rendering with the ray tracer and see if it solves the problem. lastly, never underestimate the power of 81,162% zoom. sometimes it helps. -scott

dot, in referenece to your question about dragging the shader... you can do that too but ... have you ever dropped the shader on the wrong object by mistake? and what about opening and closing the browser all the time, or switching to the master shader window of the sequencer? time consuming. instead, just leave the properties tab open (the most commonly used tab anyway) and just grab the correct shader off a list. of course in the end it is all personal preference. -scott

max, i never really use the eye dropper tool for picking shaders. i have get by with the properties box. in the first button (general) there is a little pop down menu that allows you to pick shaders. so as long as you know the name of the shader you want, just click once on the object to select it, and grab the appropriate shader from the menu. might not be as fast, but it doesn't crash out... and that is where you save time. -scott

speaking of particles... i was just plating around the other day trying to get the hang of particle systems when i noticed that the "free particle system" feature that the manual says carrara has, is not anywhere to be found in carrara studio 1.1's properties tray. is this one of those changes that happened in the software but someone forgot to proofread the manual? does anybody know what the story is on that? -scott