rtrowbridge

Many of the grouped objects I use have lights embedded inside the group. When I scale the group, everything scales as expected except for the lights. They retain their original targets, and usually their position as well. It would be great if lights scaled with their parent object. Settings like drop-off would scale as well, so spotlights would retain their position and light only what was originally planned for. As of right now, you have to go back through and fix all the lights if you have to scale an object.

Some very nice work there. On flyby shots, is the showtime composited in at a later date so you can reuse the flyby? Or do you have to render it out completely every time you want to change shows?

I'm looking forward to checking these out. Thanks for sharing!

Daz3D is still giving Hexagon 2.5 away. You will have to export obj files, as FACT files aren't supported. The following YouTube channel has over 100 tutorials on using Hexagon located in four different playlists... http://www.youtube.com/user/GeekatplayStudio/videos?flow=grid&view=1

Check out Accutrans3D. You can download it at www.micromouse.ca. It is $20.00 shareware. It won't go to dwg, but it will do dxf. If that works for you, it's a great deal.

Rob, I'm using Modeler on my Windows 7 64-bit machine. Most of the drawing issues are because of ClearType. If you turn it off before running Modeler, you get the rulers back. I found a free utility called ClearType Switch from Karpolan.com that makes it really easy to toggle ClearType on and off. I turn it off, run Modeler, and then turn it right back on.

VERY nice!

VERY nice demo reel. Keep inspiring the rest of us to try to catch up with you. I had my first "Old Man" moment the other day. A neighbor came by with her young son to drop off a town telephone list. My 4-year-old daughter came to the door with me. As they were walking off, the neighbor's son turned to his mom and asked... "Was that her grandpa?" I'm 45, so it is technically possible, but Sheesh!!

Could you please give us a little more detail? I'm not quite sure if you are trying to get a slave up and running, or if it is an issue with Renderama itself you are having. I have Renderama running right now with 4 slaves on a quad core XP Pro machine running SP3 without any problems. Here are some general pointers... Run the Renderama slave. Your firewall may protest. Just tell it to allow the slave to work. You'll see the slave IP address along with its port number (defaults to 1616). Click on the File menu and change the port number to something else. Renderama likes 1616 for the local camera. My four slaves are ports 1617–1620. Write this number down exactly as it appears. You need it when you set up Renderama. In Renderama, click on 'Add' and type in the address you wrote down. Be sure to use a colon, not a semicolon (been there, done that. It doesn't work...:blush:). You need the full address, not just the port number. My slaves are located in a different directory than EIAS. Each slave has its own directory inside this folder. As I don't want the slaves running all the time, I created a desktop folder and placed shortcuts to each slave inside it. This gives me quick access to the slaves without having to go find them. Make sure you copy over the required directories from your main EIAS location for each slave. I always copy Library, Resources, Shaders, Sockets, Preferences, and Temp. I know these are somewhat general ideas. Hopefully, they will help. If not, give us more details to go on and we'll go from there. Good luck!!! Ross

When I'm using Modeler, I like to give my wires a name that helps me remember what I created it for. I then create a new layer in the Layer view and move my wire to it once I'm done using it. That way, the organization of my objects is cleaner. Plus, I can hide or unhide my wires all at once.

One of the first things I did was to make sure "Inherit Scale" was selected by default in Preferences. Ross

This image is the result of a quick lighting test during my lunch period at work. The background image of Thor's Helmet was also used in global illumination for the purple glow. I then placed a spotlight with soft shadows in position directly in front of the brightest portion of the background for the backlighting. I set Intensity at 6.0 to get the effect I was after. It had soft, raytraced shadows and took about 45 seconds to render on my dual core XP laptop. Ross

Impressive work! The whole process was very clear in its representation. Nice job. Ross

Mark, I was able to download 1, 2, and 6. I'll have to wait until I am at my in-laws to get the others. They're larger than I am comfortable downloading at work. I did have to change the address slightly https://public.me.com/markjohnston99me the "Quality" leader wouldn't let the page load in IE8. Thanks for making these available. Ross

Mark, Any chance of posting direct links to the mov files instead of the embedded HTML page? I'd love to add these to my DVD containing all of Ian's tutorials. thanks, Ross