Anim8or Community

I'm wondering whether it makes a difference or not to decrease the size of a large environment and objects to stay within draw distance and therefor require adjustments to the camera parameters, OR is it better to stay with set camera  perimeters and keep the large environment large and therefore adjust draw distance (clipping)?......  I hope that makes sense....... In other words if I make a huge environment small, then I have Giant cameras, but my making the cameras smaller (decreasing z-near, increasing z-fare), I get the feeling it's the same thing as increasing clipping distance.

My next project involves a large environment with lots of pngs used as "cheats" for large objects-that are problematic- they don't cast shadows.  Another problem (that I also had in Worm hole) was with very complex objects like the robot I had to turn the shadow off, but everything else pretty much worked fine with shadows ON in the scene....  This got me thinking of a workaround, preferably I could use a second simplified object (like a stick figure) and parent it to the robot and set it to cast shadows FOR the robot, that is assuming that a hidden abject could cast shadows.... but it can't, nor can "clear" objects.   This could STILL work if everything was slightly smaller then the parent object thus remaining hidden...Yet i can't do that for the PNG objects.

Any ideas?

P.S. art simply crashes in the scene with all the PNG's.... When referring to lights volume is much quicker then ray traced, which I require with all that I need to do,  and I noticed it renders shadows more completely (such as logs inside a fireplace also casting instead of being skipped) then ray traced.   I will also probably end up doing allot of image sequence compositing when possible due to the complexity of scenes....don't know if that info helps.

What you see in the "bottom view" consists of 3 bowls,  the ground, sky and clouds.   They are first set up as one object then copied individually and added into 3 separate objects, and later added into the scene.

Easy 360 degree horizons, oceans, cities.  Here is a quick way of doing it all.

You can use your non-uniform-scale-tool to adjust depth of your ground layer uniformly- which effects your horizon lines height.  You can also change the texture to sand, then add another bowl, add a water texture, make this bowl very shallow and align the top with the horizon of the ground and you have an ocean with depth.  You will need to adjust the depth of your water bowl and the # of your texture tiling to give the allusion of distance. 

(revised)
The sky layer is a solid color and can be left as is to produce a horizon line best for oceans as seen in "world dome".  In the picture "ground layer ends stood up horizontal" the top-most points have been selected and first raised, then the Non-uniform-scale-tool used in top view to stand them up horizontal.  You can then add tillable buildings/mountains/or maybe a tree line to surround your scene.  If you have a fourth ocean layer made you can tile a island.  Experiment with different layers and image types (png) to create these effects.   Remember when using PNG on your sky or distant objects use "final" for your ALPHA mode. To do this go to your material-texture-MD menu, there you will see "Alpha Mode".

As seen in "almost no sunset", and "more sunset", using non-uniform-scale-tool to adjust the height of the sky bowl adjusts where the global shading is on the object, effecting  the sunset.   I will have to ask Steve if there is a better way of doing this.

I will reply here with the texture files for the Anim8or save!

Here is the house the carnage takes place, very early stage of course.  The is a dramatic tale of a young family at the end of a troubled weekend..... With a surprise ending.   I don't want to give too much away, but I need a shovel-cat/caterpilar, trees, bushes, a 2nd house-"in the middle of construction", and an 18 wheeler.  If your interested in modeling any of this let me know! Credit will be given  I'm shooting for a July release date.   

Is it possible to connect a point to an edge creating two edges?  And Is it possible to remove points without losing an edge?

Hope to have it done soon, here is a location for one scene.  Stools don't work good in sand but it's not real.

After smoothing an image I like to render to check how things turned out and sometimes it is very bad.  That is when I learned the hard way there is no undo!  oops.