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

In Windows IE8, I used Freecorder 4 to record from Vimeo or Youtube. But it doesn't get movs. Mark mentioned that there is a dropdown menu on his page, but on mine, the option to save is ghosted as I don't have Quicktime Pro. Ross

That's looking pretty cool. I hope the plane and custom issue can be worked out. Ross

Tomas, I'm at 31.1 mb right now. I tried downloading it yesterday, but it stopped at 25 megs. BTW, do I need to have my original unlock code available? Or will it just install the new files over my old ones and let me start rendering again? Thanks, Ross P.S.: Now at 39.1 mb (slow download for some reason)

Mark, I'm one of the ones using VisionLab Studio from fxhome.com. You can download the program for a free trial (watermarked). If you decide you want the program, look for it on ebay listed by TubeTape. They are an authorized reseller in the US. I got it for about half price, and it included a 9' x 12' green screen. Ross

Richard, I have 1.0.2b3 (Windows version) of Rodeo. With Ramjac not supporting EIAS since v.7, is there still a way to get the updated version? thanks, Ross

Thank you for showing this to us, Yhloon! This is a great little program! I am attaching something I threw together in it. It's nowhere what you have done, but I'm pretty happy with it, especially since I've never used a program like this. Incidentally, I was only able to open an obj file in Sculptris if I first opened the file in Wings3D and exported to a new obj file with the Tesselation set to triangles. But that does let me paint UV maps on some of these old obj files I have floating around my hard drive. Ross

Thank you for the quick update! Ross

Mark, Thanks. They are fun to do. I swapped out the original 120 GB hard drive in my laptop for a 500 GB drive last night. Now I have some more room to expand. The second drive bay has a 160 GB drive in it (It's a big laptop!). I was down to less than 10 GB free on the 120 GB and 45 GB free on the 160 GB. It's nice to have a combined free space of about 425 GB now. Time to get busy... Ross

Tom, I have uploaded a zip file to the Bug Tracker called BitmapPreviewError.zip. The file contains 5 ubershape teapots on an ubershape cylinder. When I would add a bitmap to each teapot, they would all update with the new bitmap. Teapot #2 is duplicated from Teapot #1. Teapots #3-#5 were all added through ubershape individually. Going back to edit an earlier teapot caused all the teapots except the one I was editing to display the cylinder texture (Grid). Hope this helps, Ross

Tomas asked that I try to upload an AVI file. Here is the Broadside animation I posted to youtube a little while ago. It looks like AVI files are now supported. Thanks, Tom...:) Ross