Beautiful isn't it?! It's a nice addition to C5Pro. For those with C4Pro, I've still been experimenting with the fake effect and a better effect is to use the iridescence shader and curve editor to add some red to the diffuse colour of the surface at the perpendicular to the light source and blue when it is in line with the light source. But C5Pro's SSS shading really does the job well though.

That should do it actually and it was what I was going to suggest: divide the scene up and save it as several scenes each with one figure. I suppose this would be tedious with more than 4 or so figures though but it should work. I will test it later.

There are really two effects you are trying to achieve:

1. scattered light transmission (like red hand over a flashlight - the light passes through the volume and is scattered, attenuated by depth and coloured by the material
2. backscatter (like the glow you see looking at something front lit) where light penetrates a volume and is scattered back along the light path or at an angle to it.

In reality they are the same phenomenom the difference being the angle between the scattered light and the light source (in 1, the angle is > 90 degrees and in 2 it is < 90 degrees).

both attributes are needed to fake translucent materials like skin. The curve filter with iridescence technique can be used to control the intensity of glow or transparency of a surface at changing angles to a light and so it can fake some of both effects as any organic object tends to become thinner (smaller crossectional area) towards an edge. Fake or real fresnel can help make the effect more realisticby attenuating effects away from edges. That being said, it is all still based on the angle of a surface to a light and not actually based on determining a volume and so it breaks down in places. You could try using a UV-mapped texture map to define what parts of a model are "thin" or not instead of frake fresnel to attenuate the light effect (the map is black aside from fingers, ears, nostrils etc).

I think it is going to require a new renderer or at least a new lighting model to get a good SSS effect.

Message edited on: 06/16/2005 03:36

Did you ask the fellow behind what used to be Lost Horzion Software but is now ZMorphics for help? Lumberyard started out as a LHS plugin. Contact support@zmorphics.com

How is your lampshade constructed? The shadow pattern looks like intersecting polygons. Two thoughts come to mind: is your object double-sided and are all your normals pointing the same way? How are you making the lampshade glow? Is it an anything glows light? In which case, maybe you need to change the standoff and minimum distance. I haven't seen Kixum's tutorial so I don't know how you built the scene.

For my St. Judy's Comet: Brian image, each element was rendered out as a individual picture with every other element made hidden or made black against a black background (I may have used blue as that was the dominant colour). I then rendered each object again with only a white shader, black background, 100% ambient light, no other lights to create the masks. I then brought all the renders back togther as separate layers in PhotoPaint and from there I was able to adjust the opacity, hue, glow etc of each object using the individual masks I created. In the case of that image, I actually adjusted the figure to be more orange to punch up the colour contrast. This saved me render time as I could make the adjustments with instant feedback in PhotoPaint instead of having to make test renders of the whole scene.

So how does this fit with rendering lighting effects with an alpha channels?

Let's say I want volumetric lights to have their own alpha channel: I set up my lights and then render my scene without the light cone visible. I then render the scene again with a black background and all the objects hidden except the volumetric light. Objects that need to cast shadows in the volumetric light can be made entirely black/white (or nearly transparent) with no reflections,highlight etc. (experiment) When I render this second version, I get the light cone effect against a black background. I then copy this image, adjust it in a Imaging program (convert to 1 bit, push up the contrast, colour mask etc...) to create an alpha mask of the light cone and save it as a separate image. I can then use the manufactured mask image and the image of the light alone to composite them together with the original render. You can do this for lens flares, glows etc.

It takes some planing to figure out what you should be rendering as a separate object to composite later. But this is typical film and high end production stuff: render a colour pass, reflection pass, one pass for each light used, mask passes for each object or effect, etc...

I've attached a example image of how this worked for my Brian image. The masks were created in Carrara by making the objects plain white, the background black, the ambient light 100%, no other lights and hiding all the other objects. This renders very quickly using the zbuffer. Do these steps after you have rendered the other parts of your image and save your Carrara file with a different file name so you don't over-write your original file.

See the final image at http://www3.telus.net/pem/brian.htm (the better version is at the bottom of the page)

Antoine has previously posted that Carrara runs better on NT and 2000: ie. more stable and handles memory better. I am afraid I have no other workaround except if you upgraded from RDS, try it in RDS and then import into Carrara. Your problem sounds like a memory management problem.

How did you make the chest board? It looks as if it is just a simple box primitive witht the marble shader applied. To see an edge, you will need to do two things: create a bevelled edge on the object and adjust your lighting to emphasize it. If it is just a box pimitive, go to the modelling room and go to Edit > change to another modeller and open it in the vertex modeller. Change your view to 4 views and in the TOP view click on the top to select the top surface (alternately, pick a side view and select the top surface using the marquee tool to select all of the vertices that make up the top surface). Then select EXTRUDE and extrude the top surface a very small amount, say 0.1 inches, then select only the extruded surface using the same method as above and then RESIZE in X and Y by about 97% or so. This should give you a small bevel on the top your your box. Marquee select all of the top vertices that make up the lower and upper part of the bevel and SMOOTH ALL of them to give a roundness to the bevel when it is rendered. This simply reorients the normals and doesn't actually change the geometry so you won't see a differnce until you render. from the side your top should look like this: _________ / | | This may be enough to catch the light to indicate the edge, and should make your chessboard look more realistic. You may have to adjust the lighting to pick up the edge better. A high shininess value in the chessboard shader may help. Peter MacDougall

I know it is not RDS but Eric Winemiller of Digital Carvers Guild has a plug-in for Carrara that does exactly what you want called Anything Glows.