Just to show what ArchiTools can do if you need a village very quickly. Thanks Julien! The river is from a texture map & Anything Grooves. I also found a good use for the 'flat' shading method in the Eric Winemillers's ProShaders, you can make very fast 'mask'-renders when changing your shaders to a black and white flat version (without the need to change other parameters), turn up the ambient light and you have a mask in minutes! In this case I made a render with high value an no interpolation, without bump, but that rendered the river invisible. It was present in an earlier version (with interpolation spots & flakes), so after that quick mask it was lifted. Thanks Eric! The DOF was post-worked with the excellent 'lens blur' in Photoshop, with help of the 'Distance' alpha channel. This image took a little time because of those plugins. In the first version there were streets and sidewalks in other colors, so I prepped the layout in Illustrator. I almost bought 'Replica' for this, but I had no time to figure out if that would make things even faster. I made someone who wanted to tell a story about 'database marketing' very happy with this picture. *(If you are interested, the houses with the green flag are clients, the blue are people that could be clients, so they should be mailed with a fantastic offer.)*

Great image Ruud!! Yes, you're right, with some plug-ins you can save a lot of time! Why don't you post it in the gallery? -TOXE

Well, it's just an infographic-type of thing... But it shows a side of Carrara. You're right. I will put it in the gallery.

Very nice job ! and yes, it show that plugins can add a lot to a software and workflow !

Which house is yours? Nice work.

Here's a silly one that came in for me to do shortly after Replica came out. They told me in the wanted gravel and I thought, "Oh, great. There's four hours shot. Hey, wait a minute that's easy!)

I think both hoof and Mark have great final results! Go Plug-ins! -Kix

great work by Hoof and Mark,i also like the plugins from Julien and Eric,the plugins are great.

An extract from one of my latest images with a good plug in, Anything Grows:-) In this case i've made some tests using tip objects instead of AG strands. I'm really satisfied with the result, because the fur is very soft. I've used a simple 2d vertex triangle. The nice thing is that the geometry of the triangle is lighter than the strands and it require less memory (it seems, right Eric?). -TOXE

Ooops, Mark! Really good image, every detail is just perfect! -TOXE

the fur looks awesome TOXE.

TOXE,

You're right, your method is currently 1/2 the facets that doing it with strands would be.

I thought that if segments was set to 1, sides to 2, and taper to 0 that it would be the same, but a quick test and it looks like it's generating two facets/strand for that even though it's a triangle. I'll need to get that fixed.

Cool looking critter BTW.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Looking good TOXE! It looks very soft and fuzzy indeed... kind of like a Muppet. :-) Maybe you could show us your setup in Anything Grows? ;-)

Chuck

Hi Chuck,

i have heard some days ago from someone in this forum (maybe falconperigot?) that it's possible to attach a text file. This is the browser file of Anything Grows settings. Change the extension to .cbr and the game is done (i hope):-P

-TOXE

The 'pelo3' file has to be made to make it work, I think, and if I'm right it should be triangle that is in the Z-direction, pointing in the Z-direction. I am rendering a fuzzy ball right now...

Eh. Or the other way around?

Ooops, here is the file:-) Switch the name to .car and import it in the scene and use it as tip object. -TOXE

It's enough difficult to reach a similar result of my image, because i've forgot to say that the attached file is a double sided triangle <> :-)

Okay. I have the right pelo3 now. ... is the smoke out of the back of my computer something to worry about while rendering?...

mmmh... Really strange you're using Primivol? -TOXE

Not yet. But maybe some hidden particle plug-in I knew nothing about...?

Nice! I will keep this knowledge in my toolbox. And your files too! Thanks for sharing!

Thanks TOXE... the files worked great! Maybe I'll post a render later if I get something good cooked up with it. ;-) Thanks again for the help, that's a nice setup for short fur. Chuck