Thanks for the reply and sorry to answer my own question. :lol:

Here's my little scene anyway, after framing.

Cheers.

Ah yes, you're right. I should've known that by now as it's happened before on my dodgy vertex glass.

Thanks very much for the advice. :)

This is my new model with Carrara's clear glass preset (unaltered) applied to it. The refraction is the same or very similar to that of my real glass, so problem solved there. I now have a black ring around the base and no highlight(s). I'm not sure why it's done that. Any ideas?

PS: Sorry about the shaders thing.

Darren

I'm really sorry to bump this thread again but I'm almost at my wit's end with this. I have shoestring shaders working properly afterall. The black area is just due to the distortion of the SS glass shader and me not having a back wall in my scene. I feel like taking a photo of my real glass on a coaster at the same angle as my renders just to prove how little refraction there is. It's absolutely nothing like any of the glass presets in Carrara or shoestring. I've tried minimizing the distortion by changing the different properties including the fresnel effect properties and the top half of the glass looks fine, but not the bottom half. I'm sure if I changed it to a wine glass it'd be fine but I'm determined to get this one right.

If anyone is interested in my little plight could I perhaps send someone my scene file so they can prove me wrong about this? I'm just not sure subtle refraction is possible in the Carrara shader tree, but hopefully it's my lack of knowledge or my simple model at fault.

So if someone wouldn't mind please let me know. Cheers. :)

I'm struggling to get what I want from the shader tree as it is. This image is with 25% fresnel (transparency and reflection) and 1% refraction, but this time I changed the angle of the light to simulate the lighting on my real glass beside me. I hoped that was the problem but soon found out I was mistaken, as you can see. I've tried decreasing the refraction to under 1% but I think the problem lies with the fresnel effect. I tried increasing it to 50% but I just get darker lines either side of the glass. It's as if the fresnel is affecting one layer of transparency but not both, therefore creating a bowl effect. The inside of that glass is not rounded at all yet the refraction makes it look more like a vase than a pint glass. Could it be that the fresnel is not going through two layers?

Thanks HF. I may well look into that.

That's a brilliant render you've done there Mark. Very realistic. I'm starting to wonder if my over-simplistic model is the problem rather than the refraction. It's just a lathed vertex object with 64 vertices for the circle. I have a glass very similar to it beside me funnily enough. :) All I know is when I look at it at the same angle as my render the refraction is minimal. Maybe I need to increase the fresnel effect to make it look more like the real glass. I agree that the presets produce great effects, but as I said it could be my lack of modelling skills that's the culprit here. I'll stick with it for now though and add more fresnel, then post it again a bit later. Thanks also for the advice about render settings. My laptop is a couple of years old and was pretty average when I bought it, so I'd say 5 minutes for me is about right. Last time I just used the high quality preset and added light through transparency to it and it took 7 minutes, so I'll probably stay with that now. Thanks again.

Darren

PS: This render only took 7 minutes with lower settings and a smaller image. I've since learnt to leave the big render until I've got the shader settings right. :)

Thanks for the good advice. By the way, I uploaded the image about 10 minutes after my post as it needed compressing a bit. Now you can also see exactly what I meant, but you obviously understood from my description anyway. I'll try altering the refraction and reflection of the clear glass preset first and maybe do a slightly lower quality render (as I don't fancy waiting 12 hours again), then post the result later. Thanks again. :)

Thanks, I didn't realise you can render animations in sections and join them afterwards.

I'm sorry to say I've just left my position as forum administrator of the drum n bass site I mentioned, but I hasten to add that I'll still be doing the animated logo we've been talking about, just not in the immediate future. I'm still very interested in doing animations in DS and Poser and will pursue it alongside the still images I've been working on as I'm still a complete novice and need to learn more first.

Many thanks for your valuable assistance mullman. :)

I can't afford it at the moment but I'd love to have Bryce aswell. I understand it's a serious 3D app. I hope you enjoy using it and get the results you want.

I tend to agree about the large number of frames contained in motion pack animations. The dance sequence I'm currently using (but not for long) is 560 frames and it's not meant to be looped either. So it's about 19 seconds and the GIF is about 5.5 megs. I really need something a lot shorter that can be looped, because 5.5 megs for a chatroom logo is too much to download really. I'll try and find a preset I like that fits the bill but I may have to create my own, without the use of a motion capture facility. It must be very difficult to manually create realistic human movements though.

As for the frame rate, I can quite easily adjust that in the AVI-GIF converter I'm using. I'm finding 30 fps is more appropriate at the moment, but 15 fps would certainly help with the file size.

That's a good idea to leave it rendering overnight for a high quality render. The thing is though, Poser doesn't actually tell you how long it's going to take in minutes and seconds, just how many frames have been rendered. So you have to sit and watch it for a while and work out if it's going to take hours or days. 12 hours is about the maximum I'd be willing to wait, so any more than that is not worth it in my opinion.

Anyway, I shall soldier on with it. :) Your thoughts about this are much appreciated and useful aswell.

Thanks,
Darren

Hi mullman,

Thanks very much for your excellent advice and for introducing me to ES3D and Renderotica. 

I actually bought Poser a few days after my original post. It has more features and options than DS of course but I still like to use DS aswell because it's quality is just as high as Poser in my opinion. I also purchased a motion pack for Poser from this site. It was only £6 and it includes about a dozen dance animations. Unfortunately I don't think any of them are suitable really, so I'll have a good look at the 2 sites you mentioned and hopefully find something else.

As for exporting, I've been exporting animations to AVI and using 123 AVI to GIF converter (a nice little program). Gimp looks interesting though, so I'll check that out shortly.

I'm finding that when I render my 200x200 animations I have to do a preview render rather than a higher quality. This is because often there's several hundred frames and to do anything other than a preview render would take far too long (on my computer anyway). So it's a bit of a shame that my animations look nowhere near as good as my still images, but having said that they're adequate for a chatroom. Apart from that I should have it done soon when I find a cool enough looking dance. :)

Thanks again.
Darren

Oops, sorry about that. I should have known that really. Thanks for the info Chris. :)