[Brodd Nesset]

I’m not sure what you want here.
To see the text only in the render, you have to disable everything but the text object in the object manager. Lower small dot in the View collumn should be red – this will disable it in render view, not in the editor.

Her lips said “no!” but her eyes said “read my lips”.

[Brodd Nesset]

This is a limitation of the ‘Glow’ you can add in the standard Material editor. Unlike the other channels, it is not really a channel but a post effect, and it would be tidier if you had to add this type of glow as a tag to the object in question. I guess it’s there in the Material editor because it’s ‘always’ been there and out of compability.

You can make two renders: one with the bowl disabled so that the glow will show properly, one with the glass bowl and no glow. Then compose the two in Photoshop (or After Effects) via an appropriate blending mode.

Instead of the glow effect you can make a fog material larger than the flame; yellow fog will appear through glass.

Probably best: you could also render a visible light. Put an actual light source inside the flame, an Omni or perhaps the Tube shape, with Visible light checked and Volumetric selected. Note that with complex settings volumetric light can take a long time to render, so experiment with a low/standard setting first.

Her lips said “no!” but her eyes said “read my lips”.

[Brodd Nesset]

Here are two approaches that might work:

1. Create two renders of your scene; one without any ski trails, one with trails – even in front of the skier! In a compositing program like After Effects, place the animations on top of each other and use a mask to reveal the ski trails behind the skier. It really is cheating but I’m pretty sure this is how many scenes of this type actually is done – and you don’t need to be an After Effects expert at all to perform this ‘magic’.
Now, how you create your ski trails in the first place is another matter(!). You can use a bumpmap for the trails, or make a ‘displaced’ object from a similar bitmap.
You can also create ‘negative’ ski trails, i.e. more like railrod rails, from a couple of splines in the Extrude tool. Then create a boolean object out of the downhill minus the ‘rails’ which would create trails… The challenge here is to draw splines that follow the terrain perfectly, but an advantage is that you can use this spline as a guide for the skier going down. The skier and his trails would lock perfectly! Remember you can also add a particle emitter to his boot, pouring some random snow dust out behind him.

2. If you don’t want or can’t do compositing, you can still use the above methods. Material channels like the bumpmap can be video instead of bitmap, so you could make a simple 2D animation with the trails going downhill. You’d then need to align the skier to the front edge of the trail as it is revealed; a process which probably is cumbersome, but possible.
Boolean objects are also dynamic, i.e. you can animate the ‘hole’ in an object. Here you need a sort of double boolean: first take the ski tracks (the railroad rails) and let these be cut off by a huge box object, inside one Boolean object. It is the box that you want to animate: as you move this down the rails will appear. Now take this animated object and move it inside a new Boolean with the downhill; the rails will gradually cut trails in the hill.
This may look complex but it is the most dynamic and flexible. You only need to align the upper edge of the box to the skis; should be pretty easy – and you can do it all in Cinema4d!

Her lips said “no!” but her eyes said “read my lips”.

[Brodd Nesset]

DUH!
It’s not evident from your screenshot, but my bet is that you’re working on a sphere primitive here.
Displacement only works on polygon objects – not primitives (i.e. built in objects like the sphere). You need to make the sphere editable first. Be sure to crank up the resolution from the default 24 to say 200, and when the object is selected in the manager, hit the letter C.
As the displacement actually messes up the object’s geometry, this kind of makes sense. Alpha doesn’t, and neither does Bumpmaps (even if the appearance can be similar to displacement, bumpmaps is just an optical trick with its limititions), and that’s why THEY work on primitives.

Her lips said “no!” but her eyes said “read my lips”.

[Brodd Nesset]

No pain 😉

I meant ‘expand selection’ in Photoshop.
Say one continent is ‘400’ wide. When given a blur of say ‘4’, the blur will affect the sides so that it expands ‘2’ (half of the blur) on each side. (The other half of the blur will soften the edge inwards). Now the continent is ‘404’ wide! This is the size the alpha cutout need to be too, so expand the selection with ‘2’ / half the blur. The alpha graphic needs to completely and exactly cover the continent when it has the blur appliead.

Her lips said “no!” but her eyes said “read my lips”.

[Brodd Nesset]

Thanks for this Adam. Your advice will save me huge amounts of time, and it highly appreciated.

You can learn an old dog new tricks. I hope…

Her lips said “no!” but her eyes said “read my lips”.

[Brodd Nesset]

Try to expand the ‘solid’ part of the alpha graphic a little. It could be that it cuts the holes for the ‘ocean’ parts too close to the shore… Hence the edge down to the sea will not appear.
The more abrupt the rise from black to white is in the displacement grphic, the steeper the edge will be; perhaps even so steep that it loses all contact between base and top (i.e. no ‘wall’). For a nice edge / wall, do a blur on the displacement graphic.
I think the first option is the most likely one.

Her lips said “no!” but her eyes said “read my lips”.

[Brodd Nesset]

1. For a globe where the oceans are ‘nothing’, use a black/white image to cut holes in the material’s Alpha channel. You may get a less fuzzy result by giving the image a slight blur in Photoshop. You can use any color (or image) you like for the actual land appearance, in the Color channel.

2. For a globe where the oceans are see through, but where the transparent areas have say a reflective surface like glass, place the image in the Transparency channel instead. Add just a bit Reflection and Specular (and Diffusion perhaps).
(For the optical distortion you will have with a real glass sphere, change Transparency’s Refraction to 1.5)

3. After having used method 1 or 2: to have the land appear embossed on the globe, put the image in the Displacement channel and adjust strength to taste. My tip: see that the image has slightly blurred edges; it gives the plateau a nice round edge too; it reflects the light better for a nice contour.

4. To close the backsides if the embossed land pieces I think you need two globes, which should be twins and have the exact same position (i.e. just make a copy in the Object editor). Give the ‘other’ globe a material created with method 1 only. Since its land doesn’t rise it will create a back cap.

Have fun with the cookie cutter in the Material channels!
Remember for a sphere, the material should be an exact 2:1 factor size to wrap predictably (i.e. the world map should be say 1000 pixels wide and 500 tall).

Her lips said “no!” but her eyes said “read my lips”.

[Brodd Nesset]

In the Attributes Manager: check the padlock (on that window’s top toolbar). The lock must be open.

At least one Axis must be unlocked and active; these are the X, Y and Z buttons in the top row.

You can say it is kind of silly that when an object is locked, it still appears to be editable on the screen.

Her lips said “no!” but her eyes said “read my lips”.

[Brodd Nesset]

Adobe says this: “Dedicated 7,200RPM hard drive for DV and HDV editing; striped disk array storage (RAID 0) for HD” …is a requirement for PRO 2. It’s rather confusing; if taken literally it means you can just forget about editing video with Premiere on any laptop. At least I have yet to see any normal laptop that is sold with more than one HD. I can’t believe this is actually true, since I and many others have seen video run just fine from the system disk on a laptop. For best performance, the above is certainly good advice though; I have edited video on stationary PCs in ten years and know this very well.

Anyway:
– I am using PRO v1, not 2
– My laptop actually has a firewire disk attached. Guess what’s on it – videofiles perhaps?
– How can I tell Premiere which drive is dedicated to for DV editing when I can’t even get the program to start?