@unknownuser said: That looks amazing, I am going to DL the latest version and give it a go. How may lights can you control? Upload some pics if you get something good. And/or let us know how you felt about it. You can currently control eight groups of lights. We are petitioning the developers to add more channels. I'm sure they are tired of hearing from me, but if a user wanted to make some positive comments on the nXt Forum and mention that more channels would be useful, it might help.

A useful summary with potted histories http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/England-History/KingsandQueens.htm The entry I like is: HARDICANUTE 1040 - 1042 Son of CANUTE Died drunk, aged 24 Does nothing change!

Hi andre51 The panorama was 99% standard settings in Irender NXT - I made a few slight light effects with photoshop post render but the majority of the diffuse light effects were produced by the renderer itself.There is now a new beta available which allows up to 8 light channels to be tweaked instantly post render in a separate image editor(multiple lights on each channel including sun and sky - It would have saved me a few hours on post editing. Thanks for positive comments Boothy Sorry andre51 I went babbling on without answering question - Irender NXt uses indirect lighting - presume you would call raytrace rather than radiosity - Al does a good job of explaining on this post:http://nxt.accurender.com/forums/p/817/3433.aspx#3433

Just take the model you submitted last year - put a tree on the roof and some Arroway wood on doors of the car, and maybe it will win this year.

@martinph said: ..why didn't I see this before? Sigh... I'm seriously considering getting this anyway. Congratulation to you and your team Al! Thanks Martin. I just sent you a PM with a link to our Competitive Discounts page if that will help lower the pain you are suffering. We are adding some great features to the Beta test version this afternoon, such as lighting channels, which let you adjust the intensity of individual lights after the rendering is completed. (Adjusting left-hand spot light - after rendering - with Lighting Channels) [image: 600px-Lights-ch2.jpg]

Thread revive! I found this extension and wow---it's a lifesaver 7 years later! Thanks!

This is great! Thanks a lot. I can deal with the funny names.

@unknownuser said: Question: I have used the RpTreeMaker to make some trees but when I use the option to create the Vray Alpha i get no results. And if it saved an alpha - where does it get saved... Or - maybe I dont know how to get the trees to render good (without a black outlind border around the tree)the holes that should be see thru but they are not, they have black blocking them. Now I can use photoshop to clear that black out but to save it as a new tree pic makes it square again so trying to create one for Vray seems not to be working. Maybe you can explain it a little bit to me. The Vray clipmask is saved on a "dummy" material on SketchUp. You would need to click on the material and choose "Export Texture Image" It is also stored in your temporary folder in a subfolder called RPS_TreeMaker_Images [image: 3GNe_rptree-vray.jpg]

Hi, With Fryrender can even beginners achieve respectable results. [image: CCMi_output_001.jpg]

@solo said: IPAD!!!! We have our development license for the new IPad, and are feverishly working on Mac software. But, until Mac versions are ready, we felt that a NetBook would be better for our Rendering Contest. Go ahead and win anyway - I'm sure you can put it to use.

@driven said: IDX Free on Mac I only see the shadows on 3 pains in SU not much but hope it helps john Interesting. I guess IDX handles the transparency/color much the same as SketchUp. SketchUp does "all or nothing" on transparent shadows. Off above a certain threshold of transparency and on below it.

Thanks for everyone's help on this issue. What this was all about, is that I wanted to show the effect of using a 360 Panaromic HDRi image as background for rendering, and a smooth dome makes it easier to see how the HDRI is reflected. I wanted a good tool to make a quick, smooth dome - especially for reflection examples. The image below uses a Free HDRi provided by Bryan James. He made a 360 photo of the interior of St. John's Cathedral in NYC. The Sketch Up model is a reflective ground plane, and a reflective dome. Everything else is generated using the HDRi for lighting, shadows, background and reflection. [image: Z7Y9_stjohnsHDRI.jpg]

Great! If you use the results with a rendering product, lets see what you get. I will be interested in whether it make textures tileable problems automatically?

I suppose variety is the spice of life. -Brodie

solo how is your 3d tree pack coming along? most 3d warehouse 3d trees are cack...I'd go for cutouts al, they can be touched up in photoshop to match the light/shadow of the scene. maybe sun is slightly 'overexposing' the images too?

@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.)

Here is a first shot at this. I made everything 50% reflective, and added 3 lights on the ceiling, and a room around it. First, the wide model (left to right) makes it hard to show good results on a forum. It might be better to reposition things so the overall scene is more square. I did this to make a better image. You can upload the new model here: kitchen3.skp [image: mffA_kitchen2.jpg] The obvious problems are: The three lights in the ceiling add some highlights, but the reflections would probably be more impressive with a more interesting ceiling, walls, etc. Bronze phone has white highlights rather than bronze nightlights. Teapot looks too plastic I wanted the top of the coffee pot to have a chrome look. Lets see what we can do to improve this.