Cerbera

Cinema's internal chess game is only accessible via Shift+C and the Command CHESS. That opens a new layout without an object manager, but if you close the actual chess window the board and all its components remain, so yes, you could theoretically get, edit, or replace any of the pieces. Not sure where exactly you would save them to, or if the code for the actual gameplay was accessible ! CBR

I feel a certain responsibility to help with this because I think I came up with the original rig a while back, which has since been made more complex and had other elements and parts added to it. It's certainly very complex now, and not helped, as you note, by a) viewport performance (xp calculations mainly) and b) looping an area not at the start, meaning the program takes a frame or 2 to catch up with where it is meant to be in the animation. And all this makes diagnosing the issue / suggesting a workaround / alternative method most challenging. I haven't found an answer yet. I would agree with previous posts recommending faking it if I thought that was going to be possible, which I don't. This is not a fixed camera as I understand it, and there is simply nowhere to hide any transition points in any of the objects concerned that won't be seen from some angle or other. And whilst attaching nulls to the holes in the Governer Arm seems initially promising, the question remains as to how those nulls would be also attached to the various parts of connected models in a way that could move a group of points at the end of each spring or armature without affecting the natural look of the overall deformation imparted by the keyframed FFD controlling the spring length and shape, which is very specific, curves with the central arm, and must maintain that during animation as it stretches and contracts. Very very difficult. CBR

Yeah, always the trickiest one, hey, the horsey guy ? 🙂 Unless you do something suitably abstract which means you can get away without actually modelling a horse head ! CBR

Welcome to the Core 🙂 Nice to have you on board - enjoy your 3D learnings ! CBR

Put another edge loop right next to it, with its points weighted zero. Or change the mode of the vertex color tag to polygon points; then it fills the entire polygon the points refer to with block colours. CBR

There's something very aesthetically rewarding and good about chess sets in 3D. I don't think you can ever have enough of them TBH - the scope for imagination is huge ! I also remember the Chess Challenge we had here all those years ago, unfortunately lost to (general) history due to forum upgrade gremlins 😞 Maxon agrees about chess too by the looks of it - you can still play it in Cinema right up to R25 ! CBR

Here is an idea that may serve, depending on the context / look of your scene... If you increase the tiling on the material (i went for 6 on both U and V directions) you can make the leaves more reasonably scaled to the tree. However this leaves (no pun intended!) massive gaps, because of the alpha, and it remains obvious that this is little more than a picture on a sphere sort of thing. But if we take 2 or 3 copies of that mesh, scale them inside each other, and then offset the material tiling a bit, then we can fill some of those gaps, and give a slightly better illusion of depth.... And that I think, is the most we can expect from this method. If we want to make trees look better than that, we need to put more effort into modelling, model the sub-branches, and clone small flat planes to them, to which you can apply color / alpha maps of single leaves. CBR

Ok, so your question is 'why can't I see the materials in the viewport' I presume ?! That is because of this setting you have in display options, which is overriding the material with the layer colour. So turn this off... ...and you should see the materials... If, however, your question is 'Is this a good way of making / texturing a tree ?' I would have to say no ! 🙂 If you are going for ANY level of realism then this is not the way to go. You can still use the png principle but on a PER LEAF basis if you want that to look decent. But if this is for a 'low poly' or stylised type of cartoony render than that might be fine, but usually such types of style tend to use block colours directly on geometry for leaves instead of photomaps, so there's a weird incongruity of styles there, which may or may not be what you are going for ! 🙂 CBR

Welcome to the Core 🙂 Thanks for uploading the file, but alas it doesn't include the texture in question (presumably because you didn't do 'save project with assets') so please upload the maps as well (color / alpha). CBR

Generally speaking, there shouldn't be any mesh under clothing for exactly that reason. Most of the time it is best to remove any parts of the body that are covered. Cloth collision isn't great at the best of times, but I suspect the problem is being compounded here if the cloth is colliding with a base mesh but then subdivision is involved, which of course interpolates and shrinks the surface, revealing more intersection. Of course without the scene file I can't see what is going on properly, so that last point may not apply. CBR

Yes, turn down IoR in transparency channel to something like 1.01 CBR

That one's my favourite 😉 CBR

You're welcome ! CBR

Don't use UV mapping in the material tag - set that to flat, and then use texture mode to align the gradient as you want... CBR

Nope - not allowed 🤐 CBR

Nooo. 🙂 Modo is a DCC like Cinema, with some exceptionally nice modelling functionality among other things... CBR

I must get in there and see what the quality of the output meshes is like... CBR

It is, though good call, it shouldn't be 😉 CBR

No, that is not lame rhetoric, it's just this is not an argument I need to win, and there is only so much time I have to spend listing information that's already out there ! How about all these golf clubs I have been making my clients for the last 2 years ? The new UV tools have been essential, productive, and efficient, and enjoyable to use on those, some of which have been very challenging to map optimally, and I don't recall anyone saying that about those tools before they were revamped. I can now see connectivity and distortion, can edit and arrange multiple UVs at once, have inbuilt UV maps, and lots of really helpful tools to get my UV unwrapping done. If you've already decamped to Rhizom, then stay there, its whole raison d'etre is UVs, but if you haven't, there is no need to leave Cinema. The volume builder gets regular use in my dev and conceptual work, and has transformed sculpting to something almost like a dynamesh workflow. On more than one occasion I have also used it for ultra complex boolean style operations on final pro-grade models where the camera is crawling inches from the surface, and actual boole tool wasn't going to work in a million years, or produce the quality required. Remesh gets regular use from me as well. And of course the modelling tools, which I use every day, and I'm very grateful for all the smaller improvements that have been made to those over time. Poly pen has auto-reprojection now for example... Place, scatter and especially dynamic place are just superb - all things I use time and time again. I LOVE being able to open files from anyone, and then being able to instantly load my own viewport settings. I love my tool presets so I can instantly access many variations of primitives and settings making setup times much quicker. I love the new DirectX VP which is SO clean and clear and aliasing free - it's a beautiful environment to work in now. I could go on, but there is only so much time in the day, and as I said earlier, it's not something I feel I have to defend - it can stand up for itself, and everybody's needs and likes / dislikes are different, but I really could go on and on and on about how much of what's new I use and appreciate. CBR

I think so 😉 The UV thing especially. You only don't need that because you've never had it (in Cinema) ! CBR

I would guess that this level of polygon density (almost none) is not enough to be to be able to produce a vertex map usable for keeping the scattered instances far enough away from the edges of the surface not to intersect the adjacent geometry (which has no proper real world thickness)... If you add a decent number of loop cuts into that your vertex map can be correspondingly a good deal more accurate. CBR

Field Forces, Volume Builder improvements, Remesher, massive UV improvements, updated modelling tools, updated IO modules, improved Motion tracking, much superior viewport, sculpting enhancements, place and dynamic placement tools, scatter tool, better spline pen / spline tools, better primitives and options within them, Asset Browser with unified filter presets, object presets, new GUI, Direct X VP, nodal materials, scene nodes / capsules, Magic Bullet Looks, intel de-noiser, the list goes on.... those are the ones that immediately spring to mind, but there are a lot of smaller quality-of-life enhancements I'd struggle without now. CBR

I don't have Arnold, but I can get it working with physical, which may help you regardless of renderer... But without it, I can't come up with a solution without making the hair physical, but if you choose circle or similar type in the generator tab of the hair object you can force it to create hair geo (and can turn hair render off), which you can then texture using regular projections, which should stick to the hair geo, like so. There is no reason to think that wouldn't also work in Arnold, though I wouldn't be surprised if you had to actually make the hair editable, and bake down a cubic or flat projection by deleting any existing UV map, selecting the projecting material, and doing 'generate UV cords' which would then the projection into the mesh. So, perhaps a fall-back method if there isn't a forthcoming answer directly within Arnold hair / material settings... CBR

My question would be - if it doesn't move, why can't be baked in ?! You could always keep the original in a new file so you had it to go back to ?! Unfortunately the displacer does update per frame, and that can't be turned off, so it is a bad idea to keep one of those live during an animation when it is applied to a very dense or excessively large piece of geo. The best you can hope for is some minor mitigation, theoretically achievable by dropping the Level of Detail Setting to Lowest, and if possible reducing the amount of geometry in the affected mesh, possibly via a remesher, although of course that must also calculate... but the point remains - by a long mile the most effective thing you can do to solve that is to apply the displacer. CBR

I wouldn't take out the edges you have marked, but rather these ones instead... By doing that we eliminate: The pole on border at A The triangle at B The over-density at C Before doing that I would bin off the cap end down by D, which I would re-patch later when I know how many edges will remain. As for the fact that 2 of the edge loops I want to remove run all the way down and into the cockpit that doesn't matter; it will leave just enough loops there to describe that shape once the neighbouring loops have been slided (preserve curvature on) in to fill the gaps. Quite a lot left to discuss, so on to the videos... CBR