Anim8or Community

The Shadow Bias setting is mpt currently used by the Art ray tracer.  The concept doesn't extend well to ray tracing since movig the shadow backwards only looks OK from the front.  It could appear very much worse from the point of view of a reflection.  I use other techniques to try and avoid the problem here (but I suspect that they are the cause of the shadow problems shown in other posts.)

You're right, ART doesn't support the alpha or depth channels yet.

Check the scripts directory and the "Preload SCripts" settin gin the Configuration dialog.

Sorry about thism Blank.  Tool-tips are supposed to default to on but it doesn't seem to be working.  Maybe I should make them always stay enabled!

Yes, there is a bug in the ray tracer.  I'm looking for the cause.  More examples would really be helpful.  Siragin, can you e-mail me your .an8 file?

Well, I guess I'll finally have to multithread Anim8or.  That will probably solve this problem.  Now I have to learn how to do that.  (Darn Vista! What a pain it is.)

flametiger74, are you referring to the different sampling methods in the AA setup dialog?  Those are simple different strategies for sampling the image when computing a pixel's value.

Anti approximates the light that reaches a pixel by evaluating multiple places within that pixel and blending the values together.  Sample methods are different ways of placing the samples.  All of these methods except Random first divide the pixel into a regular grid of NxN.  Then:

Regular samples a fixed set of regular positions, one per cell.

Jittered picks one random location in each cell.

Multi-juttered further subdivides each cell into another NxN sub grid.  Then it picks a random location in the a sub grid location but always choosing a different sub grid cell for eack main cell.  This is probably the bes method for sampling most images.

Random is just random locations.  It isn't really that good because it creates too much noise for a given number of samples.  But some people like it because it looks a bit like film grain.

I think you misunderstand most of what is happening.  I will try to clarify:

Turning off render preview will not have much effect on the timing for well written graphics drivers.  That's why it's on by default.   However some drivers are VERY slow at copying raw pixel bits to the screen using OpenGL - particular some low end, integrated grahics drivers - so I added the ability to turn it off.  You SHOULDN'T see much difference on NVidia cards :-)

If your computer DOES speed up a lot when you disable render preview, then you have a BAD driver.

The reason that Anim8or seems to lock up during a render (it doesn't really - it's just fully busy doing the render.  It ignors all the thousands of Windows messages it gets per second because some drivers are TERRIBLE at this and slow down horribly even they aren't doing anything - thay just are inefficient - So I ignore almost all Windows messages when rendering.  You should still be able to ESC out of the render.  Anim8or is not frozen by any means -- it's just ignoring you

You should NOT see much of a speedup changing the priority.  Anim8or will normaly get 99% of the CPU time.  In fact I am thinking of lowering the priority so other Windows tasks won't get starved for CPU cysles.  Windows isn't a very good OS at switching between tasks.  MACs, for example, are much, much better at it.

Your graphics card is a very good one for Anim8or.  I have an 8600 on one of my computers at work and it runs Anim8or quite nicely.

Hope this helps clarify a few things (to you and others).