Adam Trachtenberg
Forum Replies Created
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Yep, you can do it several ways. First, if you have geometry in the shape of the island (extruded spline), you could clone the buildings onto it directly using “surface” mode.
Second, you could use the grid array with a Shader Effector. In this case you’d need a bitmap of the island’s shape, and use that in the Shader Effector to drive the clones’ visibility (in the Parameters tab).
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If the ornament model uses triangles or ngons, chances are that displacement won’t produce a very good result. I would use a regular old bump map instead. If that doesn’t give enough depth effect, you might try tracing your logo with a spline, projecting the spline on the ornament, and then extruding the spline.
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[randy j] “The AO gives a self shadow. Mostly visable in cracks and where objets touch.
In this case you have to have a floor to catch the reflection.
You may want to use a composite tag and turn off recieve shadows rather than a sky object to keep your scene small and if you ever want more objects in the scene.
In order to pervent over exposing things try excluding them from the light. (Found in the attrubutes manager of the light under the scene tab)”I’ve done most of that in this scene file: https://www.3danvil.com/tutorials/text_on_white_background.c4d
Basically, using AO and reflection on the floor material, along with compositing tag with “compositing background” checked, as well as a sky object for the background (could as well be a Background Object).
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There’s really no need to move to Windows for better performance. The new Intel quad and octo core Macs are as fast as anything in the PC world. That’s what I would recommend, outfitted according to your budget. Don’t bother with the Quadro video card(s), which don’t offer much advantage in Cinema.
Cinema doesn’t support 64 bit on the Mac yet, so you won’t gain anything from using more than 4GB ram, but that should change pretty soon now that Leopard is out.
Before you invest in new hardware, you might see if you can optimize your render times. It’s possible that this could give you an even bigger boost than costly new hardware (although faster hardware would offer proportionate gains even then).
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Use a spherical-3D gradient and set it to “Texture” space. That should do it.
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Your computer seems fine, although of course faster is always better. Render times are hugely scene-dependent, so we would need to know what you’re rendering in order to offer advice.
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It can be done with MoGraph’s tracer object.
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You have to enable stacked textures in the viewport (Display>Stacked Materials).
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I would create the tube with a sweep nurbs (sweep a circle spline along your path spline), then attach your camera to the path spline with an “align to spline” tag and animate the tag’s offset parameter.
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The easiest way is to use a bend or wrap deformer to create the roll and then animate the deformer’s position to do the unroll.