Anim8or Community

RnDr FOX requested a how to for the pic below and for any interest here goes.

Object Mode:

Create a box, preferably a tall one as this seems to help with the "projection" of distance.

Then select all the upright faces and apply the Attribute class/glossyreflector with a Kr setting of 0.95. Then select the bottom face and apply a texture of your choice then do the same for the top face.

You could use a modifier to slightly, slightly taper the box from bottom to top but instead I went into Point Editor to select the top face and slightly, slightly Scale the Face. Place an object within the box then go into...

Scene Mode

Place Object then move camera into a horizontal position and place it in a postion so that you can see inside the box. Normally for a wide angle view I set the FOV to 90 and render it at size 500 x 300. This time FOV is set at default(60 degrees) and the size is 900 x 500.

Before rendering set Scene Attribute to RayDepth integer value 48 and Scene Attribute AmbientOccluder with integer value of 1. Then set Lighting Parameters to Global Intensity of 0 and Ambient Intensity of 2. I can't remember the AA setting but I think it was Random AA of 256 samples.

Lastly : render and done.

That was how I done it but settings should be experimented with.

I've been experimenting with the number of reflections glossy reflector can do and I think I've hit the limit but ya never know - somewhere out there in Anim8or Land someone can probably do better...

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong but when I join solids of different objects with their own materials, save, exit Anim8or, reload and open the project file the materials are still there but no longer applied to the original objects and therefore can no longer be reapplied (well, one of the materials can be).

Cheers and ThanX

Well my comp is an Intel_Pentium_4/1.6 GHz/512 MB RAM/64 MB GeForce4 MX Graphics card. Anti-aliased ART Multi-threading Renders can be lengthy times, even overnight for a pic or for the same difference one frame but that's mainly cos I'm experimenting with "Infinite" Reflection and funhouse type mirrors and there is a lot of Ray Tracing involved - I've done a render thar used about 587 million rays. The results are worth it.

But I do have one query and that is what is the overkill point for samples per pixel - it goes up in squares 1SQ 2 SQ 3 SQ - in one render I used 16SQ (I chose 16 cos I thought was a nice "round" binary number). Is that too much?

Also I cannot get fog to render under ART (but still can with scanline)

While I am not flash at making models I do like Special FX so what better place to begin than with mirrors



Meanwhile...
Happy Anima8ing

I must say though in retrospect I am impressed with the ART renderer. This single frame took about 6 hours on my comp - multi-jiggered; 64 samples per pixel; antailiased.

At 16 samples (much shorter rendering time...phew!...) However the lighting on the sphere was pixelated in comparison

I had it set up as an anima8ion but since one frame took that long to render and there was 73 frames (3 sec) to the anim8ion , at some time I'll do a low res version of it so that you can see the sphere rotating in the myriad of its reflections.