Outstanding work

Now I'm going to have to go away and have a long hard think about how you modelled the panelling.

I still haven't had chance to do much work on this, but here's a quick teaser of one of the elements I want to use in conjunction with the glass blocks.

You also have to be mindful that your texture is even in both tone and colour as strong variations will result in patterning.

I'm no expert, but here's my humble contribution.

Coconut Chair:

viewtopic.php?f=335&t=38482&p=342409&hilit#p340215

The other week I tried a 6000px by 3000px TR1 (high supersampling) render for a 360x180 panorama test. I gave up after 12 hours and realised that I needed to get my head around biased render settings.

Luckily your interior with thick glass preset worked really well Solo. And back on topic - really nice scene. Would be perfect if you randomly rotated and reversed some of the blocks for variation.

I can't wait to get back on track with my scene, but this week has been hell .

Thanks Pixero

I've already tried the Creative Suite Cleaner, but the other two look promising.

I've run into a bit of a headache with my installation of CS3 Design Premium.

After trialing LumenRT I decided to uninstall it as SU has crashed on close since installation. Unfortunately this screwed up 50% of the programmes on my PC. Neither reverting to a working configuration or restore point undid the damage.

For most programmes it was easy enough to repair or reinstall them. My CS3 suite is a different matter and none of the programmes will run because of the dreaded "AMT Subsystem Failure - The licensing subsystem has failed catastrophically". I've followed all of the solutions suggested by Adobe and others online, but nothing works. I can't even uninstall the suite in order to try reinstalling (Adobe's CS5 clean uninstall tool doesn't work).

I've downloaded a trial of CS5.5 Design Premium as a temporary solution - which works just fine. Speaking with Adobe the only other remaining option - short of upgrading to CS5.5 - would be to reinstall my operating system.

Has anyone else run into this problem and know of any solutions that might work?

Quick word of warning.

If you decide that LumenRT isn't for you, don't do what I did and try and uninstall it using the Windows Control Panel. It completely screwed half of the programme drivers on my PC and despite reverting to a previous restore point I've now got to reinstall half the programmes on my computer.

Thanks again for the advice

Rather than hogg this thread, I think I'll start a seperate project thread when I've sketched up some ideas.

@dugketterman said:

Definitely use rebar and forms.

Thanks!

Presumably it's better to get the concrete pumped rather than trying to do it with a mixer?

I'm not sure about that. I've always thought that the resonant clack, clack, clack of a wood ramp is probably more annoying if not louder than concrete.

Luckily I live in a detached house and I havn't had any complaints about either the noise of my ramp or the music I usually play when skating.

I'm still working on mine - I got distracted modelling this - but there are some really ingenious texture only solutions over at the Thea forum.

@dugketterman said:

That bowl looks pretty sick.

Like the guy says 'everyone should have one'. I was also thinking of creating seating and planters with transitions - I'll look at modelling it up later today.

The problem is that I don't know how to go about construction. Some people seem to think you should just dig a hole and build up thin layers of concrete - ghetto style. Others suggest marine ply spines and rebar?

Looking really good

You know you've been overdoing it in Sketchup when the first thing you do when looking at a render is try and orbit to get another view - doh!

At the moment I've got a timber 2ft micro ramp and it's taking up patio space and is a pain to maintain maintain in the UK climate.

After doing a lot of remodelling and landscaping on my house the last thing left to do is the back garden. So I was thinking of creating a patio area in the middle of the lawn with a sunken concrete kidney bowl that could be covered with decking when not in use.

Something like this (starts around 1:10):

http://video.mpora.com/watch/oz2OzM4us/

Either that or basic sunken min-ramp with just a transition at two ends.

That's really interesting and gives me an idea for a scene/model/render.

A glass challenge? Me? Never!!! - can't stand the stuff.

Oh go on then

When using your model with Thea I will have to separate the glass into an inner surface and individual front and back faces anyway, so UV mapping for bump won't be a big deal.

As it goes adding the bump is probably a fruitless task as I don't think many people will pick up on that kind of detail - I'll still do it anyway .

Even the plain clear one has got a bit of distortion though . Just needs a bit of bump.

Nice work and thanks for sharing the model

I've tried a few different methods of rendering glass blocks, but nothing really beats actually modelling them.