yup, I have the manuals. I just need to read some more to understand how to do it but it really hard to understand!
UV mapping is just sooo confusing!!

Regards, R

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OK, I understand that!
So what would you say that the best way to add a label to a surface and then add creases and dents etc without stretching the label?
Is it just not possible at all, because every time I've tried this, all I do is to distort the mesh and therefore distort the label!!
As for Softbody, I thought that was just for animation (which I have no interest in!)

Are UV maps not affected by the underlying mesh? I always thought they were, but I could be wrong, of course!!

Regards, R

If you have kids or grandkids, check out:
www.santas-visit.com
One of the most innovative apps in the appstore!

Ah well, I guess Carrara can't do it...
:(

Regards, R

If you have kids or grandkids, check out:
www.santas-visit.com
One of the most innovative apps in the appstore!

Thanks Brian
This is how I created the bag but if you pull and push the surface as in your pic above, all you are doing is stretching the surface. If you pull the surface using soft select (as you've shown) the edges of the bag are not pulled inwards because I cant make Carrara understand that the surface is not stretchable!
If you have a label mapped to the surface,, every time you distort the surface, you stretch the label and this can be seen clearly in the text and pics on the label.

I just wondered if I could crease the surface realistically and NOT stretch it!

Regards, R

If you have kids or grandkids, check out:
www.santas-visit.com
One of the most innovative apps in the appstore!

I can't even begin toimagine how this can be done! are there any tutorials etc?

Also, this is not for anaimation - I just need to know if it's possible to deform naturally for objects that dont have stretchable skin eg, adding realistic creases to a bag with a label on it, for example, without stretching the label when deforming.

Got the Dell. Absolutely fantastic. Noiseless, super-fast and can recommend it anyone.
Very, very pleased with it.

Well, thanks guys.
I think that I'm going to have to bite the bullet and order something tomorrow - my desktop is now throwing up errors everywhere and I think it's time to dig a hole in the garden and bury it there!!

I think, on balance I'm going for a Dell Precision T3500 workstation W3520 2.66GHz 4.8GT/s witha Quadro NVS295 card. It a lot of money (for me) but I need it to be reliable and last for a few years. I'm getting it at a good price so that helps!

Hopefully those render times will be shorter now!!

Many thanks

If you have kids or grandkids, check out:
www.santas-visit.com
One of the most innovative apps in the appstore!

Quote - I have been building PCs for almost 20 years, and my first advice is don't buy a name brand machine.  I am forever seeing folks by these and regret it later when they decide to upgrade.  They generally use lower quality (flavor of the month) parts.  They are in most cases, very proprietary meaning you get locked into buying from the manufacturer in order to do any upgrades, and you don't have much control over what goes into them,

Building a custom rig, or buying one prebuilt from a local shop means getting a better machine with better components and quite often, for less money than a name brand.

That being said, here is what I put together for my latest box, which was designed specifically for 3D modeling.

AMD Phenom II X4 (quad core) 955 (3.2Ghz) Black Box Edition (CPU is pre-unlocked to make it easy to overclock if you want to.)  MSI 790FX-GD70 Motherboard (The best on the market as far as I'm concerned.)  8GB Corsair PC1333 RAM.  XFX ATI Radeon HD 4870X2 (dual core) PCIE 2GB Video card with DVI and HDMI (with adapter).  Antec 1200 Full Tower Case (It's large to fit more drives in. I have noticed that 3D content fills up drives pretty quickly.)  Creative Labs X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro Series sound card.  Kingwin 1000 watt modular power supply (you need a big one to handle the video card and multiple drives.)  Seven Seagate Barracuda SATA II Hard Drives 1TB each.  LG DVDRW with Blue Ray reading.

It flies on all of my 3D apps.  And it only set me back just about $1K

Quote - My old PC (AMD X2 388 plus GeForce 7600GS) is dying and I need to get a new one.
I was just about to go and get a Intel Core2Quad 8300 based PC with an ATi Radeon 4830 but I've been seeing a lot of Dell Precision 600 dual Xeon based machines for a bit more. They all tend to have old 128mb Quadro FX1100 / 1400 cards though.
I currently have a bunch of problems on C6 where I can't display texture & lighting properly in the Assemble window regardless of how I set the program up. I keep having to render to see what things actually look like!. Would this be remedied by a better card?
Also, which machine would be suited to faster rendering etc? Can a 5 year old Xeon machine be faster than a modern one?

How important is it to have a high end graphics card, can someone recommend a widely recognised  'good one'?

I also use CS3 products a lot.

Can anyone please help?

Well, I don't know where you buy your stuff, but over here in the UK that little list will set you back nearly £1700 (I just priced it all) !

That's a little more than $1000!

Sorry, my existing pc is a AMD X2 3800 not a 388!
I already have a nvidia card so I assumed that this is where the problem came from. Would a Nvidia FX card be better and give me texture shading in the assembly room?

I wish I could afford an i7 based pc but that's well beyond my budget at the moment.
So is a dual Xeon 550 not worth getting?
 

Damn!
All I get with the Sparrowhawke pugin is massive crashes! I've had to rip out the battery on my laptop everytime i've tried it.
There doesn't seem to be a idiot's starter guide in the manual :(.

Ready to give up now... :(

Thanks guys,
Just checking out that Sparrowhawke thang....

Oh, buy the way, everyone's talking about UV this and UV that, what exactly does UV stand for ??

R.

It works fantastically! Thank you very, very much for all your help! Ravi

Thanks Chuck I'm going to give it a shot tomorrow - it's getting a little late over here now in the UK! Many thanks for all the help Ravi

Thanks Chuck I'm going to give it a shot tomorrow - it's getting a little late over here now in the UK! Many thanks for all the help Ravi