[Steve Bentley]

On frame 148 I can’t see the man yet. Which frame gave you the problem?

[Steve Bentley]

I just noticed something.
Is the first image you uploaded an alpha? Because I can see the rock within the water and I shouldn’t be able to.
I don’t have the arnold render so this may not be fair test. Cooking that bad frame right now to see what I get.
I thought it might have been the displacement on the water getting too high and the camera was in a wave for one frame but the displacement doesn’t look deep enough.
How long does a frame take with arnold vs the physical.? (more just to see if its worth getting – doing this with a two thread physical is painfull)

And now that I’ve had a look I see why I can see the rock – there is transparency on the water. You actually don’t need that if you aren’t going to see through the water and the waves are so low it’s not going to show. But it would speed up the render.

[Steve Bentley]

Hey thanks Adam,
Thats exactly what I was looking for. Worked like a charm.

[Steve Bentley]

is the camera interescting the ground plane on that frame? What you are describing is what happens when the camera goes inside some object and the alpha sort of turns inside-out.

[Steve Bentley]

Does it have an alpha channel? ( in this case it might be black and therefor not letting the RGB pass through and looking black

[Steve Bentley]

You aren’t passing the camera through a layer or plane are you? Like something you might be using for aerial diffusion stuck partway back in the project?

[Steve Bentley]

But isn’t that just like the random effector? It offsets the whole “animation” globaly? What I want to do is pick a specific clone iteration and shift it’s “timeline” (actually I want to shift multiple iterations, each in a unique way).
I thought maybe I could use the mograph xpresso node and each time a particular clone was iterated I could inject my own time offset.

So if I have a cloner and it generates five iterations. I could tell xpresso that if it’s iteration 2 then shove the time offset to a specifc value.

[Steve Bentley]

if that’s still giving you grief, upload the file and I’ll have a look.

[Steve Bentley]

Turn off all lights and then turn each one on and render and see which one it is – then turn off reflections and see if its that (render settings options)

[Steve Bentley]

Using a reflector would also help you control the back light on the landmass which a looks a little too bright. That and reducing your spec hilight on the landmass.
I don’t think you would actually have a reflection on the water on that side unless this is a binary system or the moon is over there.

I would save that setting because at some point you are going to want micro sparkles on the water and you won’t be able to do it – you can load this file and you’re done. I’ve spent hours trying to get the kind of micro sparkles you have there.