Well I almost am ready to start animating. The problem is when I did a thumbnail render of this tunnel about 5 frames in a 9 second animation had dropped poly's. Is there something I can do about this? It only really shows up in the animations I think. I cant tell for sure b/c when I render the frame I think it is its ok. I dont really want to move the camera or objects to fix this b/c its perfect except for those 5 frames. I thought there was something you could do to increase/decrease the density of the objects to fix this? The objects are all just rectangle primitives that I put in the assembly room. Should I convert them from primitives to vertex models? This would be a bit of work (like 40 peices) but I just dont want to move the camera or any of the objects..its so close!

Very cool tunnel! I'd suggest converting to a vertex model with higher poly count, but can't promise it'll fix the dropped poly's in the animation. Are you using distance fog in this? Sometimes that causes odd glitchiness (even in RDS -- the stable ancestor of Carrara).... Lots of reflections, here. Must take a decade to render!

It looks very well, will you post the anim one day ? I'm not sure what you mean by "dropped polys", Brent . Do you mean that some polygons don't appear ? If the 5 frames that bother you are at the end or at the beginning of the animation, maybe you can just cut them if they're not necessary ?... litst

Well its wierd..its just like 5 frames or so @ random intervals. The poly's are dropping that are at the edge of the camera field. This is a common occurance in video games (clipping) but a 3d program shouldnt have the same problem. Its not dropping a shape or a primitive its actually dropping a polygon thats is non existant..almost like a direct x error or something. Worst case I bring them into photoshop and hand correct them with the pixels from the previous frame (I love photoshop and AE) Im not using distance fog tho so it shouldnt be that. I'll post this thing up when its done. The current problem is that its going to take about 3 weeks to render on this machine. I am thinking I will bring my machine from home and network it here. I think that will drop the render time to 7-10 days. Anyone have a renderfarm set up yet?

Hi Why don't you just duplicate your camera and rename the duplicate, then move it around to check your object. You can delete the duplicate when you get ready. Ed

I have 3 cameras all ready...it all looks good. There are no holes in the objects and the cameras not hitting or pokeing thru...it has to be some type of render error.

Before committing your computer to a long render time, maybe you should weight to see if Eovia finally comes out with our elusive patch, which has been promised to us for "some time next week".

Maybe you could even directly ask Eovia if they know a remedy to that bug . Thinking of something ... Does the little camera object in the assembly room overlap your tunnel objects ? Sometimes some gaps appear between two overlapping objects . If it's the case, you can scale the camera object down . I doubt it's the cause of the problem, but who knows ... litst

Make sure you are using the Ray Tracer instead of the Hybrid Ray Tracer. It'll be slower, but I've had some problems in the past with the Hybrid Ray Tracer dropping polys that are too close to the camera. Good Luck, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins

I agree with the Raytracer comment. I've had much better luck with the Raytracer than any other renderer. -Kix

-Kix

well I have determined that I am just going to go for it as is. The test render I did was with the hybrid at a real low resolution. The final will be raytraced. When I would try to find the frames with the dropout and do test renders I used the raytracer so maybe thats why I couldnt find the dropped poly's?

I think it may be a combination of the two issues: size of the camera object and the raytracer vs. hybrid renderer. Now that I hear the details (dropped poly's at the edge of the frame) I think it's likely the hybrid issue. That used to be a HUGE problem in Infini-D (some of the code from which still lives in Carrara, I think). Keep us posted!