Anim8or Community

Well, it kinda can now.  Use something like Photoshop to make a nice big square jpeg, something like 4096x4096.  Towards the bottom of the image paint a sandy texture, towards the top paint a rocky texture, and paint grass in the middle.  Use this to build a material.  Now, once you have your terrain, apply the texture, but set the UV coordinates from one side, or the front or back, rather than top.  The highest peaks of your terrain will get the rocky end of the material, the lowest will be sandy, and the slopes in between will be grassy.

I used this technique here for the canyon texture:

So long as it was not actually necessary to set the coordinate for each separate level every time.  The default should still be coincident UV coords, able to be separated as a choice.  But yeah, great idea.

No worries Steve. I've never really bothered with volume shadows, so you can't miss what you've never had, huh!  Dude, there's no rush to fix minor issues like this.  We are all having a ball playing with Anim8or, and I for one am in some considerable awe that this package has been written by just one bloke, in his spare time.  I have no doubt that the day will come when Anim8or will be sold alongside Lightwave, 3D Studio Max and the like, and when that happens you can employ a team of testers to fix little bugs like this, and get on with Anim8or V2.0, with physics engine, motion blur, particle engines, animated materials...... *enters happy little daydream of glorious things to come*

PS: The ART renderer ROCKS!

That's some pretty high standards you got there bud!

Wow!  Something to aspire to, huh!  Some great tips in there too.

I'm not really sure what you mean by cropping.  If you are going to animate the scene, why not animate the birds at the same time?  If the birds will be the only moving thing, why not just animate them and use the render as a background?  If you are trying to combine two separate animations, that will be harder, and will require techniques mentioned by Roygee and thecolclough, in my opinion.  Personally I would use a green-screen, alpha channel type method, using transparent backgrounds (see the section in the manual where Steve places the bird in the photo with the cat), but the frames would still have to be individually combined (in my case in Corel PhotoPaint, which can dissemble a video into editable frames and reassemble into AVI or whatever).  If the camera for each animation does not move in the same way, however, you will have quite a task ahead of you.

Hey, don't get rid of this model, though.  Apply a yellow/white material with a nice fine bump map, simulating sand, model a bit of a beach, whack in a star fish or bucket and spade, and this model would be excellent as a sand castle.

Ok, just to be certain.  Go to Object mode and select the object that is the upper part of the chair.  Combining my method and hihosilver's, go to the Top view and move the entire object so the centre of the seat coincides with the grey central crosshairs.  Now, click the button below the select mode arrow button and use the movement tool to move the coloured arrows that represent the object's centre of rotation to also coincide with the central grey crosshairs (you will need to be in wireframe mode to see them).  Now, still in the origin mode, click on the select arrow (not select mode) and click on the screen, somewhere where your object isn't so the object deselects while in origin mode (this can be important - without this sometimes the origin does not stay moved).  Now you can return to select mode (top left button) and then to scene mode, and the object should rotate about its own centre.

Also, I notice from your images that the chair is rotating wonkily.  If you deselect the "Y" and "Z" buttons when rotating, rotation will be constrained to the "X" dimension (left/right in screen coordinate mode, which you are in) and the chair will stay straight.

I hope this helps.  If it doesn't make sense (which is a distinct possibility - I have just got out of bed, its Sunday morning, and last night's indulgences are punishing me severely) I will post some screen shots.