[Adam Trachtenberg]

Hmm, maybe you need to increase the ray depth and/or reflection depth in your render options?

[Adam Trachtenberg]

If you go to your material’s “illumination” tab, you’ll see a property called “Texture Preview Size.” Crank it up!

[Adam Trachtenberg]

The distortion you’re describing sounds like like an anisotropic effect, which is caused by parallel scratches in a surface — like brushed steel. But I’m not exactly sure what you mean. Can you post a pic?

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Looks like you have it covered. Welcome aboard!

Only caveat is that, if you think you might be buying some modules in the future, it’s cheaper to buy one of the bundles than to purchase a la carte.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You don’t have to have an initial keyframe; ctrl + shift + drag the keyframes to copy the keys and track in one go.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

First thing I’d try is the boot.ini trick to get Windows to recognize 3GB ram. It’s not really dangerous — you can put in a line that let’s you select whether you want to enable the switch at startup, so if there is some problem you can start normally.

It looks like this:
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional 3GB” /fastdetect 3 GB

Otherwise Win64 is certainly an option. The only downside is that plugins have to be compiled for it, and many of them haven’t been.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You have a couple of options. First, you can try upping the GI settings. I would definitely reduce the diffuse depth from 5 down to 2 or 1, which will make up for a lot of lost time. I’d also use a wider range between the Min and Max settings — at least a 1:5 ratio. Then I would increase the quality setting substantially, to somewhere 90-100%.

You could also use stochastic mode, which is slow but flicker free.

Or, you could copy the “news network” extrude, convert it to real geometry, swap out the converted object after the extrude animation is done, and bake the illumination on the converted geometry.

And of course you could avoid GI altogether.

hth

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Hi Joe,

Yes, Clothilde and Cloth module are one and the same. Sagging the plane will work fine as long as you are using UVW mapping for the material along with a stick texture tag.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

What version of AE are you using? If it’s CS3, have you downloaded the new AE plugin from Maxon?

[Adam Trachtenberg]

[Adam Trachtenberg] “You could use subpoly displacement in the material to create some depth.”

Thinking more on it, as long as the plane isn’t board-straight, e.g., you use Clothilde or some kind of deformer on it, you shouldn’t have a problem with it disappearing from the side.