align, it depends a lot on what your intentions and occupation are. if you are an architect or designer, hence the focus of your work is the design, you would be better off with one of the applications that demand a short learning curve and that are easy to operate. i am talking of podium, twilight, irender, kerkythea, idx renditioner, indigo, pov-ray, etc. however, if you are an ilustrator or work in the visualization field, you might want more control to achieve super-hyper-realism. then it is probably worth – i say probably as you can achieve exceptional results with any of the apps i just mentioned – having a go at the likes of vray, maxwell, modo and others of the same caliber. but never forget solo's wise warning: rendering is at best 50% to do with the app you use. the rest is up to the artist in charge.

@aceshigh said: @al hart said: @aceshigh said: How do you guys do it???? How do you set the z-distance as the color intensity??? We did it by extracting all the faces and surfaces and running them through OpenGL in a separate routine and grabbing the OpenGL z-buffer. However, I believe you can do the same thing by turning on fog, perhaps making it a color, making everything white, rendering the image, and then processing the intensity of the images. Things that are further should be a different color or darker. (I was considering a similar "distance from the eye" routine for making shadows which get lighter as you move into the distance (without applying fog to everything), or Sketchy Shadows which change as the object in shadow is farther and farther from the eye.)

Thanks for your replies, guys! I´m going to try out some demos and see how it goes ( I have attempted to learn Blender, but I am not really happy so far ). Cheers!

maybe that's a job for beer exploration pav

You're right, each medium has its advantages, but a medium of dimension n+1 can include the medium of dimension n. it is also true for post processing such as Photoshop and other rendering software, add some lights remember that what you see on the 3D pdf is just an ... jpeg ... I allow your computer to calculate the rendering in different positions and / or animation (or I does not). Each media has its time, one day when we will realize that the paper is so precious that it will end to the museum with the painting etc. ... The trick is to adjust the precision (or the features) of your model to the user. Do you think one day we will see cameras in 3d? in fact it already exists and is based on the technology of augmented reality, see the video I sincerely think that technology evolves too quickly, but we are not, we must be aware, and that is the goal of the tutorial ...

Agree w/ Frederik, please post Twilight questions in the Twilight forum... we may not necessarilysee a question placed here. could be that some kind of geometry is blocking the light? could be that the lights are large radius? could be many things. copying a light from one file to another should work perfectly

@dedmin said: @cadward said: Thanks!......I just picked up a copy of 3DS Max Design 2010 ....trying to learn it on my own ......this should help greatly ...now all I need are good resources for the modelling part .... http://cg.tutsplus.com/category/tutorials/autodesk-3ds-max/ http://www.3dsmaxtutorials.net/ http://www.creativecrash.com/3dsmax/tutorials/ http://www.3d-tutorial.com/tutorials.php?cat=7 http://tutorialoutpost.com/tutorials/3d-studio-max I would highly recommend these guys. http://www.go-2-school.com

@solo said: FWIW I use Deep exploration for both import and export/conversion of .stl formats. Solo: I am new with SU. I just received a .igs file that was done in inventor. Can I import this to SU to view?

I have had all sorts or problems rendering this one model at any res over 800x600???!!!!! My work around was: -To render the house and tree in one render with alpha. Saved out as a vrimg then converted to exr then converted to png 32bpp -Then render garden and fence in another render with alpha. Saved out as a vrimg then converted to exr then converted to png 32bpp -Then bring the 2 images into PS -The garden and fence become the top (which has a transparent or alhpa backgound) layer which has a slight ghosting around its boarders (fence line and some plants which overlap the layer below). Hope this makes sense [image: Trailrender_05resized.jpg] This is the top layer

Thanks for news, are good that not only in fairy tales on Cornucopia are interested, only there still it is not enough people...

Yes that is a nice site. I have been a member there for years.

Check under export what settings you have. Maybe its mm and your importing as meters?

Cheers 11zulu, always handy to have a good stack to go through when i've got a bit of spare time

Hello all, I'm new to the board. I've been trying to learn rendering and would like to see su2pov work on the Mac with SU7. I have SU6 Pro but the latest version of su2pov ported to the Mac is 2.4 which apparently does not work on SU beyond ver 5. I thought I would work on the ruby script su2pov.rb that comes with the Windows version of su2pov (su2pov3.2) which does work with SU6 to see if I could modify that for the Mac OS, but unlike other ruby scripts I have seen, it is not a plain text file. Does anyone have any information about su2pov for SU7 OR a Mac version of su2pov3.2 OR any guidance as to how I can get a version of su2pov.rb (v3.2) that I can open in a text editor? Thanks, Rich

Has anyone got any experience with SU animate and Mac? I'm trying to use it, but it just keeps crashing after I end a path. Any suggestions? I'll try XP- see what happens. Also, Sorry if this double posts, but the internet is really crawling here!

Hi Mike. I was just going to reach for my credit card, when I noticed that I must pay via PayPal. This would have been fine a month ago, but in the usual PayPal way, they seem to have messed my transition to a new card up- and at the moment I have no PayPay!! Argghhh!! I wish people would take gold old VISA again, or even Kagi, because you can't save any edits in the demo Tom

Ahh thanks ill go check it out, I am a member of those forums but forgot all about them! I think Sepo will be able to help if im still stuck after looking at the podium help thread.

@davidboulder said: I do a lot of panoramic work, there are plenty of free panoramic options there to view panoramas, as well as to create them. But It appears that O3D also does other things. Can you give us some hints on good ways to go from equi-rectangular panoramas to web page display? O3D could do some other things. But I'm not sure what would be useful for a Panorama - while you are looking at an image pasted to the inside of a sphere. Perhaps adding hot spots to link to things? (An, of course, the ability to put a page on your site which will display panoramas directly from the .JPG or .PNG. Do any of the other solution let you pass an image to a single web page for display?) We keep looking at 03D just in case it every catches on or does something good. You would think it would work properly on the Mac browser. If you get the O3D to work, try using the "?file=" mentioned in the first thread of the post to view one of your own panoramas and send us the link if it works well. Are you creating Panorama images from SketchUp?

I don't know but after trying so many rendering plugins for SketchUP, IREnder nXt is the overall winner foe me! It is not the best quality, nor is the fastest and easiest, but as a whole rendering solution hands up! I'm testing it - You double click on a material in the frame buffer to edit that material - really sweat!

@notareal said: Please, read the KT getting started tutorial, again with the care. [image: front_back_101.jpg] Image by Frederik Lets continue this topic at KT forums. No need to split this discussion at two different sites. okay thanks! sorry did not know I was talking to the same person on both forums