[Sam Moulton]

tried your expression, seemed to not work. The first one did, but the second one was fouled up because i got 30 as the max blur and changing the max blur didn’t change anything.

I tried this expression which adjusts blur based on speed.

L = position;
bf = .01 // blur factor;
L.speed * bf

a more elegant solution, which I may work on would also correct by the ammount that the object was off from a whole pixel value. want I mean is if the position was 23.2 pixels it would blur less than when it was at 23.0 pixels because aliasing would add to the apparent blur when the layer isn’t at a whole pixel value.

interesting idea…

[Sam Moulton]

I’ve been playing with card dance. You can create the curve there if you set up a bunch of rows, but i can’t figure out how to make a card dance layer accept shadows. i’m really having fun with card dance. my new favorite time waster.

haven’t played with freform. may check it out

[Sam Moulton]

the loss of quality depends on the codec you used to render the qt. this is why I always render things that will take a long time to render using animation at best. this is a losless codec and doing what you suggest will not change any of the pixels. sometimes you can get away with rerendering dv footage once or twice before it starts to fall apart

[Sam Moulton]

Found a render farm that could do the work if I threw in a littel extra for them to complete the project for me and use their facility and their machines for my project. This was the first time i’ve farmed out work to some folks that are really doing high end work for major players and I have to say that it was a pleasant experience. I was a little intimidated but if you look hard enough and are willing to pay a reasonable amount folks in the community are great at getting the job done.

I wish maxon still supported 8.5 with plug-ins and modules, but with the grin on the client’s face when he checked a few of the frames that were sent to me by e-mail, I’ll be doing more work for him. Then I’ll be able to afford the upgrade to 9.5 and the toon and shader plug-in. I’ve not seen another 3D package that has a shader like that. if there is one for lightwave or another app and it’s about the same price as c4d upgrade, then i might be willing to try and learn another app. I think i’ll probably end up sticking with c4d though…

[Sam Moulton]

are you importing as footage or as a sequence?

[Sam Moulton]

Thanks, I found a company LA that is going to process my files. I just e-maild them the settings and for an extra $50 they applied the shader settings on my project and put it in the farm. I should have my render on monday. maybe if I get another job like this I can afford the upgrade.

[Sam Moulton]

I spent more than an hour on the phone and got all the way to one of the head software guys. Thy just don’t have the 8.5 sketch and toon shader anymore. Originally, they thought they would be able to burn me a disk, but no luck. Can’t afford the nearly $1400 it would take to upgrade to upgrade to 9.5 and get the shader. i really like C4D, but their upgrade priceing is really steep. it’s nearly $800 which is almost half of the outright price plus another $500 for the shader. i’ve got the $500 that I can throw at this project, but I don’t have $1400.

i’m looking into a render service that may have the plug-in. i can experiment with the shader properties with the trial version so I’ll be able to send along the settings I want to use.

thanks anyway….

[Sam Moulton]

i saw a tutorial somewhere that used card dance to make an army. you could put a bunch of your trees on a layer say a 10 x 20 grid, then set up card dance to break them up and stand them up and distribute them. this way you would only need about 3 or 4 layers with a bunch of trees on each layer. bet it would render much faster than 500. bty i’ve been playing with card dance recently and you control it with a gradient. it’s loads of fun

[Sam Moulton]

i saw a tutorial somewhere that used card dance to make an army. you could put a bunch of your trees on a layer say a 10 x 20 grid, then set up card dance to break them up and stand them up and distribute them. this way you would only need about 3 or 4 layers with a bunch of trees on each layer. bet it would render much faster than 500. bty i’ve been playing with card dance recently and you control it with a gradient. it’s loads of fun

[Sam Moulton]

using qtpro is the only way i’ve ever been able to make this work. i don’t think you can access all of the lags from the output module. i always render animation then render for e-mail or web from qtpro because i don’t have any cool compressors like squeeze or cleaner.