[Eric Bowman]

Not sure if you found a solution, but I would highly suggest not doing this in 3D. I worked on a pontiac spot a while back and initially the concept was very similar. We were to create the look of ink being dropped into water. The problem is that you end up getting a very uniform look, and it’s tough to get that stringy, billowing effect (especially tough with realflow).

I would suggest shooting this and compositing multiple shots to create the effect you want. Alternatively you could go buy riotgear from videocopilot.net. It has a few HD clips of exactly this sort of thing. They are in slow motion too.

Hope this helps.

Eric Bowman

[Eric Bowman]

I was hoping for another solution, as we don’t have Net render setup yet. Is there no other way to do this, other than saving multiple files?

Eric Bowman

[Eric Bowman]

I know this is almost a year old by now but we were having the EXACT same problem here and found a work around. I assume you found one too.

We simply went to material options for the problematic layer(s) and turned off the ‘Accept Shadows‘ option. By default it is turned on. Seemed to work every time for us.

You MIGHT be able to remedy this problem by also adjusting the Advanced 3D plugin / shadow map options. Just hit ctrl+K or cmd+K on Mac, and click on the advanced tab. There’s an options button beside the advanced 3D plugin drop down. By default it’s set to Comp which means it will use the Comp’s resolution for your shadow maps. You can however set this to whatever number you want, and I would suggest lowering it until the quality is unacceptable. This should speed up renders too.

Eric Bowman

[Eric Bowman]

Not a problem man. I’m glad someone out there is willing to help me out on this. I greatly appreciate it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts when you get time later. I’m curious as to how to get it to work via Xpresso. I’m a bit green on Xpresso other than simple things. It’s something I’m really trying to get into though…the true power seems to be in Xpresso.

I did read on CG Society about one possible solution but I can’t get it to function properly. Nick recommends using the link box in User Data for the Atom Array object. I can’t seem to get it to change a thing though. Here’s a quote from his post explaining the process:

NWoolridge
11-05-2007, 05:12 PM
Certainly the mograph cloner object adds all that flexibility and more, though the setup might be a tad more involved…
…Like this, for instance.

Drop an object into the link box in the User data area of the “array cloner’s” attributes field. Change the child objects in each cloner to get a different object onto the edges, for instance.

A little more xpresso would get you a pretty automated setup, with central control over many of the various parameters…

Nick

Eric Bowman

[Eric Bowman]

Thanks Brian. I appreciate the quick reply, and that’s exactly the model I was going for. I can’t believe that was there the whole time. I kept looking right over it. The model is frickin’ perfect now, but how does one go about animating each element now. I’m going to hit the manuals. 🙂

yeah i thought the second image would be a bit more complicated, and honestly it’s not needed for this project.

Thanks again.

Eric Bowman