Cerbera

If you have R18 there is a Magazine preset in the Content browser that does nearly everything this plugin does ! CBR

Even if you do acquire it , it won't work with R14. Needs R17 to work properly... CBR

Here's Part 2, in which we make the base using a nice easy lathe... If this post gets more than 5 likes I will make Part 3 - the difficult scroll top ! ;) CBR

My Gif Tips are like buses. nothing for ages, then 2 rock up at once. Today, we're modelling Corinthian Columns in this 2 part extravaganza, and we're doing it properly. First we'll do the main columns with lovely SDS poly modelling... So enjoy that... part 2 next. CBR

Yeah that's pretty helpful, although takes a bit of getting used to predicting which button you need to press when the object isn't a cube ! CBR

Almost :) Colour goes much more desaturated at night, and you need less intense blues and less contrast between moonlight and shadow, so I'd be turning the density of those shadows down, or pumping up my ambient light a little to back them off a bit. Secondly, grass and trees retain almost none of their verdancy at night - they go pretty much grey, so you can address that in the material directly. At the moment shadows are too dark and powerful, and take up too much of the scene. So bleed some colour out, possibly change the direction and height of the moonlight to limit the shadows, and try and get a more grey-blue feel overall. That should apply to everything except the front porch lights, which you can saturate more, and make slightly more orangey, which will contrast well with your lightened desat blues. CBR

As mentioned in this thread, there is a plugin that gets the data but not sure if it does anything looks-wise... CBR

I don't think that particular model is compatible with C4D, being that it is only available in native Maya format with Maya-specific animation controls... but good that it shows the sort of thing you are looking for... CBR

Nothing beats Truepianos for me - something about the unlimited polyphony and never-ending sustain :) CBR

That is looking a whole load better than it was. Path is fine now, grass much better, good background stuff and textures. 2 things to try to make it into a night scene... 1. Get Arnold's equivalent of a sun light (directional), make it an off white-blue and quite bright. Then get anothe rlight doing only ambient illumination set to very dark desaturated blue to slightly fill in the shadows. 2. Take that image, into photoshop and color grade it ! CBR

It will work with flat mapping if you set the direction of it correctly with texture / Axis modes. But cubic will do, and this is much better, although it seems raised slightly above ground level, whereas normally paths are carved into the ground, if you see what I mean... it's the displacement doing that, so maybe drop the path object a little, and cut some polygons away in the main ground to accommodate it. Or it would look even better if you just did it with multi textures and alpha masks and just one ground object ! In fact you could make all the natural surfaces in this scene from a single landscape if you were so minded... It's too short, too thick, and there's nothing like enough of it. You want several million hairs, with some random direction bend and much less clumping. Or, there is another, better approach using multiple hair objects. Even with hair's incredible scope for variation, you will still get even better results if you have several hair objects, with complimentary settings so you give the impression of a truly random patch of grasses. But I would suggest that you actually go outside, look at loads of real grass, and try and work out precisely what qualities make up its character, then replicate those in the hair material. It is possible to get a really stunning result this way. Here's some I made earlier that way... Keep trying :) A couple of landscape objects scaled and flattened a little, with different random seed should suffice... No, I don't have Arnold. I could tell you how to do it in the native renderers, but that won't help you I suspect... CBR

Ah right that would explain it. Non manifold edges like this are terrible modelling technique, and we do expect that sort of thing to break the functionality of the polygon tools in Cinema. I would guess then that there is nothing you can do about that other than repair each error individually, after which the poly tools will work, or find or make a model that doesn't have these modelling mistakes in it ! Just seen all the ngons in the file as well - those should be fixed too before we can expect things to work properly.... CBR

Thanks for making this - I can see how it's a big time saver. Will have a play with it later and let you know how I got on :) CBR

To be honest with you, both UA and UR are not 100% bulletproof, and contrary to what I have heard claimed, do NOT work all the time, even since being rewritten for R19. Those algorithms still get confused when faced with something like this. I am unaware of any script that fixes it, but the typical solution doesn't usually take long so I'll just tell you about that instead. When Align Normals doesn't work on the whole object it will probably still work on smaller groups, so just do it in a few stages. Select only the blue polys and reverse just those - just mess about a bit with selections and the 2 commands and it will work in the end. CBR

Yep, that seems to have fixed the shading errors :) Some other things though, if I may ? 1. Your gravel path is being stretched in one direction, and looks comparatively fake next to everything else because it has no depth. You can fix this with bump, normal or displacement, and by adjusting the texture (should be flat mapping) so it is scaled 1:1 with the source photo. 2. That grass is still way too spread out and has too many gaps. Grass next to houses, even weird ones, is usually luxuriously dense and verdant, but I don't think you should neatly trim it, as a little length and wildness in the grass will add character to the scene. 3. The whole image is ruined for me by abrupt cutting out of the ground plane and the miscellaneous black void behind it - I presume you intend to fill that with something, but if not, then that's what you need to change most about this picture ! CBR

AB is right of course - it's not necessary. But you try and take the middle C# off my piano, playing any of the other C#'s available just ain't gonna do the job - they're not in the right place ! ;) It's nice being this fabulously lazy. CBR

Goddammit man I thought you played it ! I would have been sooo impressed :) But it's a great thing anyway, and that's a pretty decent virtual sax ! I like Audacity; I used to use it live when my function rig went 100% Virtual instruments for a while, and that function is particularly helpful ! CBR

Awesome, I fully appreciated this, and not just 'cos your voice reminds me of Lemmy out of Motorhead :) And go Cubase ! ProTools can get in the sea when that's around ;) CBR

Yeah it was a new one on me too - designer friend told me about it, Chrome auto-updated and then away my favourite button went ! :/ Fortunately someone even more on the case had the answer waiting ! I don't even get why the Getty thing was necessary, when it's so ridiculously circumventable, and for a long time they have been able to prevent (most) people downloading copyright images without stopping people directly viewing them ! I guess too many people know about Print Screen and Disable JS now ! CBR

Ah yes, we can see what the problem is now we have the wireframe view. It is two-fold. Firstly, see the corner pieces of your house, and how many segments are in them to support that level of bend ? Now look at the walls, which you also asking to bend nearly that much, but now you give them nothing like enough polygons to hold that deformation, so we get what can best be described as a sort of 'degradation error' as the software tries its best to do what you;ve told it with not enough geometry to do so ! Triangles are particularly not helpful here, especially when they are that big, when they really can disrupt any edge flow you may have going on with that object. Here we have here an example of a situation when triangles can ruin things (or at least compound other errors) regardless of SDS ! The second problem is likely happening because of using cubic mapping on a sloping (non-cubic) surface, in combination with the problem above. Cubic is great when it's all straight lines and planarity, but as soon as you add wonky angles it is no longer the optimal mapping method. In this case, UV mapping mode, and actually UVing the object will give a flawless result that none of the standard projections can match, although flat projection applied several times to different parts of the object in different planes may give you a half-way house kinda answer a bit faster than actually unwrapping it (although even that would be quite quick too if you know the tools well enough) ! CBR

I suspect there are some topology, phong shading and texture mapping problems with the house, as I can see multiple shading artefacts and material mapping errors there. If you upload the wires / clay shaded model we can advise further on the former 2... The latter can probably be fixed by changing the mapping mode to cubic, or, if that's not working, in a more superior way by actually UV unwrapping the object. CBR

Go back to the first post in this thread ! CBR

Thanks Bob - I'll make some more soon hopefully... Glad to hear you're making Houdini modelling work for you ! CBR

Well what's the point of removing the button if that's still gonna work ?! :) CBR

If you are on Chrome / PC then they are trying some nonsense with removing the View Image button from the Image Search in the latest version of the otherwise excellent browser. This will be potentially most inconvenient for us lot. Unless we immediately go and get this add-on, which puts it right back where it belongs ! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhcelnjdmblfmjabdeclccemkghjk CBR