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ShaneS · 21st November 2004, 02:44 PM

Hi all,

I've encountered a few problems that hopefully someone can help me out with:

1) When using a sky sphere, I still get shadows projected onto the sphere - the headlight is turned off, but if I position the lightsource too low, the shadows still show. Positioning the light higher in the scene results in it being toplit which doesn't look very good - the scene then looks too dark from the viewer's perspective. Is there an easy way to get around this? Ideally, something like a way to ignore an object for lighting purposes? This would be very useful for creating stars and other glowing objects too.

2) Has anyone had any experience in combining Terragen with AC3D? I'd like to use some of the landscapes in conjunction with models, but I don't really know how.

3) I'm probably going about this the wrong way, but when I want to mirror an object, such as an arm or a leg, I copy it and scale by -100 along the mirror axis. This sometimes (particularly with cylinders and spheres) results in some, but not all surfaces with normals reversed. Am I doing this the wrong way? I usually fix this by setting all the surfaces to double sided, as there are too many to fix individually, but this doesn't seem a very efficient method.

4) With the above scenario in 3), the boolean operations plugin doesn't always seem to work properly, although it seems much more accurate than it was before the upgrade. I should probably post this separately.

5) Can anyone recommend any good animation software (I have to do something with all the models I'm creating :-))? I'm looking at Anim8tor at the moment, but something that supports the AC3D format natively would be good - the last time I exported as a 3ds file, it didn't seem to retain the material colours.

Thanks all!

21st November 2004, 02:44 PM	#1
ShaneS Junior Member Member Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 15	Some problems Hi all, I've encountered a few problems that hopefully someone can help me out with: 1) When using a sky sphere, I still get shadows projected onto the sphere - the headlight is turned off, but if I position the lightsource too low, the shadows still show. Positioning the light higher in the scene results in it being toplit which doesn't look very good - the scene then looks too dark from the viewer's perspective. Is there an easy way to get around this? Ideally, something like a way to ignore an object for lighting purposes? This would be very useful for creating stars and other glowing objects too. 2) Has anyone had any experience in combining Terragen with AC3D? I'd like to use some of the landscapes in conjunction with models, but I don't really know how. 3) I'm probably going about this the wrong way, but when I want to mirror an object, such as an arm or a leg, I copy it and scale by -100 along the mirror axis. This sometimes (particularly with cylinders and spheres) results in some, but not all surfaces with normals reversed. Am I doing this the wrong way? I usually fix this by setting all the surfaces to double sided, as there are too many to fix individually, but this doesn't seem a very efficient method. 4) With the above scenario in 3), the boolean operations plugin doesn't always seem to work properly, although it seems much more accurate than it was before the upgrade. I should probably post this separately. 5) Can anyone recommend any good animation software (I have to do something with all the models I'm creating :-))? I'm looking at Anim8tor at the moment, but something that supports the AC3D format natively would be good - the last time I exported as a 3ds file, it didn't seem to retain the material colours. Thanks all!