Speaking of Chanlum....

[LucentDreams]

first, did you really read NAAMS instructions that on the site where you downloaded, all those questions are n fact covered there. But rather than us go over this all again simly do a search for chanlum there was at least on thread that went fairly in depth on it

[JIII]

along long time ago I read the directions on Naams site over and over again and believe me, they ignored one thing.

where and how to load it. In my noobish ignorance I tried to load it into the coffee window. succeeding only is destroying the scene file that I attemped to use it on, to such an extent that cinema would crash upon loading of the file.

The simplest directions are, click on the little triangle thingy in your material. select the plugins menu and select chanlum.

that is the only thing not mentioned in the previous thread.

[LucentDreams]

well being a shader it seems like it would be obvious it would load where all shader plugins load.

[flingster]

personally i just had problems reproducing the results in the documentation...but i notice on some of the images on the site now he has given the settings..

(something i think the translucency plugin site could benefit from..imho):rolleyes:

[LucentDreams]

I disagree, the translucent plugin gives a detailed description of each setting and how it effects the result. there was also at least one provided example file what more do you need. When it comes to materials and shaders I really stand by the belief that you shoulod understand how each setting effects the material. First thing I see students do when playing with mateirals is try making glass or metal, which is all wrong IMO. Can't make good glass till you understand what glass is. So you need to learn what skin mode does, how is it different from regular mode, what does the depth setting do. Perhaps your not getting the result you desired simply cause you though depth of 100 seemed high but you object is 2000m. So read carefully through the manuals.

Understand how the shaders works thats whats important. After all, everyone talks about fresnel for glass, but really fresnel and translucent do the same thing they create a gradient on an object, thing is how do they figure out the gradient, well fresnel does it by looking at the ange of the normal to the angle of the camera, meanwhile treanslucent does two tings, it uses the depth of the object, the thinner the lighter the colour, and second italso uses a fresnel to creates its second third fourth however many samples you set, or in other words the subsurface samples.

[flingster]

yup point taken...i agree with what youre saying...no arguement here...but as you may have noticed with some of my other posts on cgtalk...i have great trouble with materials...sla...noise...chanlum..transparency.

i think your essentially right when it comes to reproducing materials in a 3d environment...you need to understand the real world material first before even attempting to recreate it...however I have great problem with then just hacking and bashing my way through different settings and re-test runs etc...ok some of this process can't be avoided..but personally i would like to be able to do the method then implement it...in other words i should be able to plan the material settings before essentially opening the material dialog...and i'm just not at that level yet....

hence my comment...i also think one of the nice things about the chanlum documentation is he went into the technical aspects a lot better...where i find sla docs fall down also in this area...dunno really. i don't think its so much an arguement about documentation but more a case of seeing other peoples examples and there settings..
:wip:

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