Are there any entries? Will those be posted sooner, or later?

I know I sent one in... at least I think I did.

-Matt-

It's levitating! The Force is strong in this one.

I was just browsing the Ray Dream Handbook (that's about four years old now) and saw a tutorial for making a glowing atmosphere for a planet. It's a little different than the Aura. You put a bulb light at the center of the planet sphere, and give it a Light Sphere effect with a radius slightly larger than the planet's radius. Turn on turbulence, etc. Never tried it - I wonder how it turns out? Beautiful render.

The reason is stubbornness, really. I'm not going to upgrade the OS (again) until I upgrade the hardware, and I keep putting that off. That depends on balancing the purchase of a new system with the rest of my life - and you know, of course, I'd have to get the dual 1Ghz G4.

Then again, maybe the reason is also sentamentality. This 8500 has been through a lot. The plastic front is discolored; the fan is noisy and the 2nd drive is noisier; I've taken it apart and put it back together many, many times and it still works.

Aw, who am I kidding. The reason is money.

-Thirteener

He models the eyelashes, for cryin' out loud. The eyelashes!

To continue the learning curve, everyone go to
www.3dluvr.com
then get to work!

-13r

Problem solved. In short, it's all Carrara's fault. Or it might be the .obj format. I experimented along the lines as nvar1ath0tep suggested, splitting apart the different sides: back, top, left, etc., grouped them together and exported the group as obj. I opened it up in UVmapper and selected the Box projection to show the six sides, then selected each object and projected each one as Planar and arranged them on the sheet. Opening it back up in Carrara, no problem, it took the Parametric texture map. The edges of each object - top or left or back etc. - were creased, but the edges inside each object were smooth and gummi. So I started experimenting with cubes. The results are shown above. Either in the export to obj, or in the import to Carrara, all edges are made smooth, whether they were creased or smooth to begin with, and no matter what the angle of their facets. All edges, that is, except the edges of a polymesh. The outer edges were left sharp. I tried one cube of one polymesh, and one cube broken into two polymeshes. You can the the two meshes pulled apart in the model room image. The two halves are put close together, but their vertices are not welded. So sharp-edged obj imports can be made of seperate objects, or one object with seperate polymeshes. Live and learn. 13r

Try changing the file format to Photoshop 2.5 rather than TIFF. You'll get a file in Photoshop's native format and still have all the G-Buffers available.