[Shawn Marshall]

Hi:

Thanks for the reply; I appreciate it.

If using a texture map to conform the photos to the continents isn’t feasible is it possible to take vector art of the continents, Spherify that and use that in the Cloner to place the clones? That artwork would probably come in as a spline, so I don’t know if it would work.

I could shrink down the bulk of the images pretty small, like 300 x 200 or so. What I don’t know is how to assign each of the photos to its own clone. Is there a way to string those together in a Quicktime and then assign each frame to a different clone using some combination of effectors?

Shawn

[Shawn Marshall]

I’d be willing to drop maybe $1000 on a Mac graphics card if I was assured of speedy performance comparable to a middle-high end PC graphics card, but my research indicates that even the $1500 nVidia Quadro FX 4800 performs poorly for professional 3D work (due to crappy Mac drivers), barely outpacing a much cheaper gaming card.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

I take it you’re both talking about graphics cards for Windows systems?

I’m running R12 on a 2008 Mac Pro (2 x 3 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon) with the stock ATI Radeon 2600. That card’s performance seems so-so. Unfortunately, graphics card performance for 3D on the Mac has always been mediocre.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi Jerry:

Thanks for taking the time to reply; I appreciate it.

Unfortunately, you’d lose your bet. When I bring the reference QT into Quicktime player to export an h.264 I get the gamma shifts. Same thing happens when I bring it into Compressor.

However, if I bring it into After Effects I don’t get the shift, even when I play it as a Quicktime with AE (double clicking on it in the project window). It also plays correctly in the AE footage window (option double click).

I can continue to export an h.264 straight out of FCP, but I prefer the option of compressing it in another program.

Thanks again.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi Brian:

Thanks for taking the time to work that out: I really appreciate it.

An alternate solution, which I ended up using, is to use a cubic map and make the Z scale very small (I used .01 ft). The image texture on the sides essentially disappears, revealing the base blue texture underneath.

Your solution would work great if I need two distinct images mapped to the front and sides.

Have a nice weekend.

Shawn

[Shawn Marshall]

Thanks for the reply.

I’ll do everything at 30fps like I do in Lightwave. I think my tracking problems might have been due to a bad track in Syntheyes, which I think I’ve corrected.

Shawn

[Shawn Marshall]

Apparently I can halt the calculation by hitting Option B to start another preview, which interrupts the current preview.

Shawn

[Shawn Marshall]

I’m not exactly an expert in this, but I have been dabbling with Syntheyes and C4D for the past week, 3D motion tracking a greenscreen shot to drop a person into a virtual set. I built the 3D set in C4D at a real world scale of around 30′ across and made sure to set the coordinate system on Syntheyes correctly, setting an accurate distance between several of the trackers. I think I had the Lightwave import set to 10.

I grouped the camera and trackers together to be able to move the view in my 3D set where I wanted, and the actress maintained good registration with the 3D set.

Don’t know if that helps.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Well, still learning here. I thought the Environment object with the Pyrocluster VolumeCluster had to be visible to the renderer for the dirt particles to be visible, but apparently it doesn’t. So things seem good now.

Thanks.

Shawn

[Shawn Marshall]

Ding Ding Ding Ding!

We have a winner! Upping the Ray Depth to 50 made the alpha render properly at zero.

…except when used in conjunction with an Environment Object with the PyroCluster VolumeTracer tag. Even when I crank the Ray Depth to 500 I still get some objects with 100% alpha where there should be zero. I’m using PyroCluster to render the dirt particles I’m generating in this scene.

Any guess how to get around that, besides rendering the particles by themselves and compositing them in AE?

Thanks again for taking the time to look into this. I really appreciate it.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics