Here's a quick question for all of you meta-marvels: for some reason, the materials I assigned to a metaball model are not showing up correctly. On various spots on the model, mainly at the junction of two balls, only the diffuse colour is showing up, not the bump, spec, ambience, etc. I thought it might have had something to do with a negative ball interfering, but its doing it in areas nowhere near any negatives, and the next material is not even close to the "area of meta-influence" where this is occuring. Any thoughts?

A picture might help. :^)

This is not my "second childhood". I'm not finished with the first one yet.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

"I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather....not screaming in terror like the passengers on his bus." - Jack Handy

I don't know what the exact problem is without a picture. Maybe I can find out more if you post one.

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So you want a picture, eh? What, my incredibly descriptive, and yet apparently useless, description of the problem wasn't enough? Hmph. :)

On the left is the layout of the metaballs. All of them are positive. The right shows what I'm talking about. The more I ponder this the more I am convinced it is a problem in the rendering engine itself. As I was rotating the meta-model to make the above pics, I noticed that the "shaving" phenomenon seemed to come and go, and even move around! Maybe I'm just going bonkers.

Boy, darndest thing I ever saw! Stupid question #1: Do you have the 5.01 update for Bryce? I had a lot of trouble with metaballs until I updated. After that, no noticeable problems but I've never seen anything like this.

This is not my "second childhood". I'm not finished with the first one yet.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

"I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather....not screaming in terror like the passengers on his bus." - Jack Handy

Yep... 5.01 installed and running. This IS a weird one ain't it? I thought maybe it had something to do with the frequency of the material of the adjoining metaball, or maybe the bump value being different from ball to ball, but I double checked everything. In essence, its just two balls that SHOULD be sharing an identical material but aren't for some reason.

Ok, looks like you have the materials set to object oriented. Set them to worldspace and try again.

Err... yeah. World space. That fixed it all right. My bad. You see, THAT's what happens when you stay up late making pictures! Thanx Ornlu!