Quote - Still not coming right...Perhaps I should avoid anything with a regular pattern altogether and stick to the asymmetrical.

Nah- don't let the polys defeat you, incognitas. The uv's will map image/procedural area to polys so all you need to do is get a calculator and work out your poly/image area's height/width and calculate how many times you need to repeat your brick texture upwards and acrosswards to get a reasonable brick pattern. You might have to edit your original texture to make it work the way you want. If it's a procedural texture, try fiddling with the values in the offsets i.e don't tile 4x4, tile 20x7 or something.
Keep going!

Quote - Wish I'd have waited, but in the fall of aught six as my PC was on its last leg, Apple still couldn't say when the Intel machines would be available. Soon was as close as they would say for months.

So in November of that year I did the next best thing and ordered a Alienware Area 51. The SOB weighs more than a server with four liquid cooled core duos; 3 terabytes of hard drive; and three gigs of ram... ...actually cost more than a top of the line Mac. 

I still hate it!

Ha! I have a 2 gig G5, a 2 gig standard G4 and a G3 750mb running OS9 and I love em all! My boys have Intel Macs and I've now refused to try to fix them. What's Bootcamp for? Doom. Or Halo.

Sorry Eric and Joe - completely off topic

Hi guys

That font problem has popped up in a number of forums and Ariel seems to be the most common culprit, although the truetype helvetica has been mentioned too.

Eric, instead of using font manager to disable it, why not remove it from the system font library altogether so it never loads?

Don't know if this might help - I regularly get this in Amapi. If I'm really lucky I get a warning that says "bad geometry" or "invalid command" or something like that. It just doesn't like what I've done. Then the whole kaboodle ups and disappears. The only way I've found around it is to go back to the original scene and copy each bit into a new doc, see if I can spot the error/s in the models parts and then paste the bits into a completely new doc one by one. It remembers the position, so it's no great hassle. Just a pain.

Fran, have you considered that it might not be mistiness, but  light reflections? Nearly everything reflects to some degree and looking at your checkerboard, the lightness towards the back looks more like it's catching the light.

It might be an idea to post the actual Carrara file on this thread so some of the pro's can take a look at the scene settings. Carrara is a very good renderer - almost photographic - so mistiness is much more likely to be from the way you have the general atmosphere and lighting set up than a problem with Carrara. And as for C5pro, yes, give it a try and then go up to C6 pro :)

BTW I just noticed that you have things like pixel accuracy set quite loose - If your shaders are grainy (quite clumpy patterns) and the pixel accuracy setting is low (as in fast 'n' dirty), the render quality won't be very nice because it will just skim over dark/light patches without nicely rendering the inbetween colours and tones. If you set the pixel accuracy to a smaller number, the render will achieve a better subtlety.

Thought No.2: I can't see anything obvious in your screen pics so try setting your render settings a bit higher, so anti alias is good, raytrace is full quality etc etc - just pump it all up. Then render at a much higher output - it makes quite a difference for single images - I normally do a test render at around 600px to get the idea, then a big render at around 2000px if I like the small one.

If that fails to improve things, make sure you haven't got anything in the scene settings turned on that shouldn't be, such as lighting effects or lens effects, and do the same check with the shaders, to make sure you're not looking at a lot of graininess that is actually in the objects shaders themselves, rather than the render. I think that makes sense???

well it sounds like that should not happen at all. It sounds like there might be something seriously wrong with your software. Carrara is quite a good renderer and only renders blurry stuff if you tell it to, so if your image is smudged and foggy, it is possible the software is corrupted and not rendering properly.

If there is nothing in your scene settings, lighting and objects that would cause this, I would uninstall, do a system check and then reinstall. If the problem is still there after that, it would be a good idea to post screen images of your scene and the render. That would give some idea of what you are getting.

Not sure what you mean here...

If you mean that when you do a render preview test in the scene room, yes, it collapses/disappears when you next do something. It's only a sneak preview. Personally I never use it. I do a lo-res render in the render room so I can switch back and forth between rooms because the render room image is written as a permanent image until you decide to overwrite it or not save it. On a mac it's faster than the scene preview as well.

I agree! Looking very nice!

There are some Lightwave car models here:

dmi.chez-alice.fr/models1b.html

Some might be of use to you.

Hello Kunshouling

here's a thought for you: perhaps your global illumination is too bright - or your ambient light is too much. If you think about it, if it's dark enough to have streetlights on, most of the surrounding areas away from the streetlights would be really quite dark - the buildngs would be in silhouette against the skyline and so on.

Maybe it's not a shader problem, but perhaps there is just too much "scene" light, so it's cancelling out the effect of your shaders.