Anim8or Community

Great book! Excelent use of textures and specular maps, and some fine textures, I would say. However, I have my disagreements, as I've seen some old books. I have a dictionary from the beginning of the 20th century (a true treasure and very rare).

What do you mean Olias? Sorry, it's just I don't get you. I still think the hinges are a little bit out of place to be honest, but that's just me

I think that too. They should be about 5mm from the spine. That looks like 15 to 20mm.

Very good ship. You could apply a detailed texture to it, with all the fuselage parts and things.

Well, I decided to suppress the freight elevator. It wouldn't make muck sense to have one in an apartment building.

Volume shadows have never worked properly, something Steve is aware of.  Fixing them has been kinda low priority because ray traced shadows work fine and produce a much more realistic effect.  Like colclough, I tend to avoid using shadows at all, if I can, due to the long render times.  The only times you really have to use shadows is in strong, single light scenarios, basically outside on a sunny day or space scenes, etc.  That is for animations of course.  For single model renders shadows, especially soft shadows, can make all the difference.

So, in interior scenes, you do not use shadows? Well, that raises a problem: How do you prevent lights from illuminating the other floors?

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However, it seems that the lights on the above floors illuminate the scene below.

I think that only happens if your floors are 'infinitely thin' (single yellow/blue face) instead of being a 'cube' (yellow/blue-blue/yellow)

No, the floors are perfect cubes with 10 units of thickness. I can't find any reason.

Well. I'm starting to have my reservations about this project. Yesterday, I've made an experiment by making a sketch of a shaft. However, it seems that the lights outside the shaft were not behaving as I predicted. The light just gone through the ceilings, lighting the  the ceilings above.

Attached is the mess I've done. Of course the doors won't be stacked as a single object. This is just trial and error (being the error quite evident. I've tried several configurations with the lights, without results).

My guess is that the ceilings have to cause 100% dark shadows, but unfortunately that is a light property. I mean, the shadows cannot be 100% black, because there is always the reflected light, but the ceilings must cause total occlusion. The only way to minimize the blackness of the shadows case I choose the shadows to be 100% dark is to use more than one light per floor (which I was going to use, anyway). Is there any other solution?

Also, I had to change the lights from volume to ray trace, or the rendering would appear to be scratched. Anyone noticed this problem with volume lights before?

I've made all doors required. Still to do are the door frames. Here are more pics:



The large door that you see at the left is for the goods lift. There will be a stair around the shaft of the passenger lifts (these elevators will share the same shaft, and that's what you will see). Of course this is not the final disposition, but it is pretty much close.

Try using XVid in your post production. It is better than DivX and the quality is superb (you can't notice any difference between the original and the compressed video). Go to:
http://www.xvid.org/
Its free and open source.

I never used XVid in the intermediate files, but I think it will do. I normally use Intel YIUV for that.

This project is what you can call a "doorless" lift (or elevator). It is one of the models that were built in Europe in the 70's and 80's. It is still at is very beginning, This is perhaps the most ambitious project I've made. The final animation will have first person views, views from the shaft and views from the machine room.

The motor sound I'm using is awesome. It fits perfectly for a small lift. You can hear the original recording by pempi at:
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=33873. I've cleaned the audio and prolonged the landing to 3 seconds.

Anyway, here are some pics of the door:



Next thing will be the door frame. Of course I've to make the cars, the whole shaft, the lobbies at each floor and the machine room. Of course there is rigging, and then, texturing. The most complicated thing to do will be the traction cables, that have to deform around the drive pulley.