Mash

one problem is that your base mesh isnt actually flat. If you crank the phong shading angle down to 0 and stick a light to the side, you can see the middle is flat, but the curves surfaces have depth to them: If I just run a plane through the base mesh, you can see these parts all stick out

Just because the control mesh is straight, doesnt mean the resulting SDS mesh will be smooth. The different heights are going to cause different rates of curvature top to bottom. In this case I would go with either a volume builder based approach, or just leave the edges sharp and use material rounding to smoothen the edges volume.zip

... and on that, is there a way to get this properly into photoshop? PS has no 'interpret' options for me to discard the alpha to do the same trick I do in AE, outside of rendering the image again with no alpha channel. Strictly speaking I CAN get the content into PS and it does look good if I go via 32bit exr, but once in, I cant squash it down to 8 or 16 bit as doing this re-obliterates the glass again.

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Ok, so my current method of working in AE where I take a copy of the render interpreted with no alpha channel (so I get all the rgb data) and set it to add mode; then use a second copy of the render with the alpha enabled and throw it on top as a solid normal mode is pretty much correct then? ie. its as good as adobe AE is going to get given its shortcomings.

Then pardon my daft question, but what would be the correct way to composite this in post? Lets say you have a red glowing cube you want to bring in on top of your composition. You bring in the cube renders (premultiplied so the glow is maintained in the rgb data), they sit on top, but the alpha layer outside of the cube in every 3d render engine ive used will be solid black because there is no geometry there, thus the glow of the red cube is completely cut off. Previously (and currently frankly) I have been bringing in a second copy of the footage (which does have a glow visible in it, but the alpha obliterates it), placing it under the red cube layer, disabling the alpha entirely, then setting it to add or screen so the glow can show back up again and composite over my background. But this always needs 2 copies of the render in my comp, if I just use the add/screen layer then the red cube would show the background through it.

I think you may have this backwards. In plain language: Straight alpha: Stores the full RGB colour for each pixel, but ignores how transparent it may or may not be. ie the transparency of a pixel has no impact on the colour stored. This means for example if you render a white cloud with a soft whispy edge in a blue sky, the rendered cloud will only contain white cloud colours, the blue of the sky will not be present in the rendered cloud, even where the alpha transparency eats into the cloud. Premultiplied: This simply means the image being rendered has already had the background baked into the rendered colour data. In the cloud example it means that it will start to turn blue as the edge of the cloud becomes more transparent. In practical terms, straight alphas can be great because there's no bleeding of the background into the visual RGB data, you can take your white cloud and throw it onto any background you like, there wont be any blue from the sky creeping in. On the other hand If you place your premultiplied cloud onto an orange sunset background, youll get a blue halo around the cloud, which sucks. However.... It isn't all roses. Sometimes you need the background colour to be baked into the transparent edge because some things are just flat out impossible to render due to the number of layers present or the motion on screen. Here's one which screws me over regularly; what happens if I have a 100% transparent plastic fan blade, but the fan blade is frosted. And in the middle of the fan is a bright red light. Visually the fan blade has the effect of looking like a swooshing darth vader light sabre. Its bright red and burning white from the brightness, but whats there? a 100% transparent object.... The alpha channel with a straight alpha will obliterate my rendering, its 100% transparent plastic. You can see it, but the alpha channel decides to ruin your day and now the rendering is useless. The only option here is a premultiplied alpha where the background is baked into the motion blur and SSS of the plastic fan blade. Sure, I need to make sure my 3d background somewhat matches my intended compositing background, but its the only way to get any sort of useful render. Same goes for motion blur, DOF blur, multiple transparent layers in front of each other (steam behind glass) The honest answer is, use whichever one is least likely to screw you over. If you have lots of annoying transparent/blurry things to deal with, go premultiplied but plan your background ahead of time. If you want clean alphas on a simpler object render, go straight alpha. I haven't read your linked blog all the way through, but I will say... there are an abundance of wrong people loudly proclaiming themselves to be fonts of all knowledge. Theres one in the octane community who insists on inserting himself into literally every thread on the entire octane forum to tell you youre an idiot for using a png file, he has 100's of blog pages which are a strange mix between 3d rendering and flat earth magical woo woo maths to show everyone just how right he is. That said, your rainbow example does match up with what the blog says. The only difference is the blog seems to think the straight alpha is evil and you should only use the premultiplied, whilst I would say both have their uses, with straight being preferable when possible.

If I were in this situation, I would disconnect my machine from the internet (kill wifi, pull ethernet), because then theres a good chance it will simply timeout after 30 seconds.

Perfectly reasonable price for what it does tbh. If you need to make a minecraft world environment for a job then its an absolute bargain; and with the release of the film its probably a pretty good time to release it.

Basically yes. It forces c4d to run the crash routines which includes attempting to save all open files into the bug reports folder. Theres a slightly different key combo on mac, ctrl alt cmd backspace i believe.

press left shift, right shift and delete at the same time (on windows) to force c4d to crash. You can then go to the bug reports folder and hopefully your c4d file will be in there

There's the legal situation and then there's the real-world situation. Be sensible about it. I'm not putting up my work on a widely publicised website where perhaps the wrong person will see it and get annoyed. Instead I'm simply putting together a portfolio and then adding my link on my resume when applying for work so people can see what I can do. Personally I take the route that if the artwork is in the public and I am the one who produced it, then I will show it to whoever I need to to get my next job. If you ask for permission then everyone will say no. So don't ask for permission.

The nas drive will be as fast as your network, the server and the drives. I have a 13 year old synology ds 112j. At best it would do 80mb/sec which is the 1 gbit networking limit more or less, but in reality it would do 40mb/sec because i used a cheap SMR drive (normal harddrive, but budget made, theyre slow, avoid if you can) but throw in the realworld limits of small files and it probably actually does 20mb/sec. If you want fast transfers, make sure you're on 10gbit networking for the computers, cables, switch and NAS, it will make a significant difference. Then secondly, make sure the nas enclosure and drives can do the speed you want. A modern single hdd will do about 150mb/s on large files, so what works well is however many large harddrives you need for the storage, then add an SSD cache drive to the nas. This puts the most recent few TB of data on the ssd so they can read and write super fast; only pulling up older archive data from the drive will have the speed penalty. Depends how deep your pockets are Depends how nerdy you wanna be Depends how much space you need something like this is a reasonable mid tier option £250 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKXMH977 Or £160 if you want the geeky raspberry pi route with ssds https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DNH9R63H Or if you have the money then a synology unit, but you dont get much hardware for your money

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And remember just because 80 objects hit it, they dont all strictly speaking have to visually precisely impact it. the linked video isnt actually influenced by the objects hitting it. It just kinda moves naturally at about the same time as things arrive. Here for example at the 40 second mark, 14 cables connect to a device. Its nothing more than a vibrate tag getting ramped up and down as objects connect. https://youtu.be/38L4cXLz9r8?t=34

I dont see any real simulation here. The large central object reacts 3-4 frames after objects hit it and at 1 second in theres a huge lurch to the left despite no objects hitting it from the right. Its a nice animation but it 100% isnt reacting to those parts hitting it. Now the animation may still involve some physics with damping, but that motion seems hand animated to just make a visually pleasant animation. eg the attached scene is a single model in a mograph fracture object (just to mograph-ize it, might not even be needed). Then add a rigid tag to it, then enable some position and rotation strength in the forces tab of the rigid tag. Then slap some quick animation on it and watch it bounce and react to movement. shunted.c4d

Why not just buy one online? turbosquid is filled with wrinkly sofas. https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/ettore-corner-sofa-1308922 https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/poliform-bristol-sofa-942040 https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/restoration-hardware-petite-cloud-track-arm-slipcovered-sofa-1068021

If that were any more AI it would have 3 wheels, 4 fingers and a naked woman driving it.

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ok, main thing here is that sometimes too much detail is a bad thing. Your displacement map is a 2000x4000 image which is fine, but youve told octane's displacement to use a resolution of 8000x8000. This means the displacement is going to start showing the lower resolution of the image in the geometry. Lower the resolution of the displacement to 4k or 2k, then on top of that add in 2-3 pixels of gaussian blur below to give it a little more chance at being smooth. Next you can bump up the AA filter size a little. The default is 1.2 pixels wide, youll be fine with 1.3 or 1.4 Then I actually lowered the reflection depth down from 32 to I think about 10. Your letters are reflecting each other, making reflections of reflections. This wouldnt be so bad, but... ... your glass is too perfect. With 0% roughness you dont have glass, you have the most pristine diamond in the world. Ive taken the greyscale displacement map and piped it into the roughness of the glass, this way only the lettering will get a slightly rougher/softer finish. Its then dialled way back by setting the mix value of the roughness channel to 0.02 so it only affects it very slightly. This gets me from here to here

post a scene file or send it privately if you need ( mash@3dfluff.com ) and I'll take a look. dont forget textures The cause of the dark strip will be a reflection of a reflection of the sky bouncing between the letters but that doesnt explain the jaggedness

Gregor did all the hard work for you, all thats left is for you to do is make an object rotate in a circle. With all due respect, if you're struggling to rotate an object then perhaps simulating the 4 dimensional fabric of spacetime isn't a task you should be attempting just yet.

Step 1: Uninstall Norton Step 2: Beer

Ok, nvlink is a bit more complicated than SLI. SLI is a simpler connector which syncs cards and is designed for using multiple gpus to render realtime frames in games. That tech is more or less dead, nobody uses it. NV link is more or less SLI v2. It allows for a more sophisticated sharing of resources between cards, ie pooling their available memory and fast data transfer between the 2 cards. It is possible your 3d render engine supports nvlink to access more memory and gain more speed, but it will be very driver and 3d app specific. Beyond that im afraid I cant help much as arnold gpu isnt the most widespread engine

Pull this out of both cards. It may be a solid pcb or a soft flexible cable.