Anim8or Community

I've fixed several problems with z-limits.  The scanline and OpenGL renderers should use a project's environment settings now.  I've also set the lower limit to 0.01.  The upper limit is still 100,000.  Also the ratio of ZFar to ZLow is restricted to 100,000:1.  (The ART raytracer has no limits - it doesn't use a perspective projection of the geometry.)

Relaxing these limits can cause artifacts, I believe, due to the limitations of single precision floating point math but I'm not really sure how bad they are.  I may be able to remove the ratio limit and the upper limit altogether without making them much worse.  There are some articals on that that I'm looking at now.

But be warned: Using very small values for Z-Near causes a serious loss of precision in the depth buffer for things onlt a little bit farther away resulting in improperly rendered distance objects.

If you can describe a way to reproduce this I can look into it.

I usre MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 12 for this and pretty much everything else movie editing wise.  It costs about $50 and is a very capable movie editor, sort of like a poor man's Final Cut.

When I first started working on Anim8or, selection was always on similar to what you suggest.  But a lot of people had problems with it, especially beginners.  For example, they'd carefully select some faces and then try to apply a tool.  But if they missed a selcted face instead of using the tool Anim8or would drop the existing selections and select the new face.  So I changed it.  Now you know if you're selecting or editing and can't do the wrong thing.

You're right.  Thanks for the report.  I'm looking into it now.

#096-014 - ART Renders Don't Show Panaroma Backgrounds.

I found the problem.  I had forgotten to set the texture coordinates in one case so the ones from another face behind the visible one were being used.  Will be fixed in the next update.

Thanks for the examples, everyone.  I used all 3 to help find the cause.


lynn22, unfortunately the front cover sheet still shows through to the back.   This is becasue ART only uses the front side of a two sided surface.  I'm not sure how I'll handle this but I'm looking into a fix.

I think there is a z-limits bug or two in Anim8or that could be causing this.  I'm looking into a fix.  You should be able to set these values.

Starbuck, can you send me the .an8 project for your box?  It's probably the simplest of these.  Something is obviously screwed up but I can't find it in my tests.

lynn22, are you using two sided materials on the cover page of your book?  ART doesn't support two sided materials.  If you could send me the .an8 project for this, too.

kreator, while I'm at it, can you send me your's too?  Especially the box.  The texture coords are really whacky on it!  Hopefully these ar eall the same problem but you never know.