Bonedaddy
07-28-2003, 05:55 AM
Howdy all,
I am doing a shot currently where the camera navigates through a forest, revealing a decrepit old church. I have noticed/had probs with the following things, consulting to the greater wisdom of CGTalk:
1) The camera moves pretty slowly past some foreground trees. The branches will occasionally shift down a foot or two inexplicably, in the middle of a render. I read about this "popping" on the Highend3d PFX FAQ, and since I am using a Mesh Brush, cannot up the stamp level. So I converted to poly, which works fine, but causes increased render times and shifts the lighting DRAMATICALLY. Did I take the right approach, and is there any way around this?
2) Because I now have to relight for the foreground poly trees, I want to add lights specifically for them. However, no matter what I do with light-linking relationships, or putting poly tree-only lights in Render Layers, the pfx trees in the bg pick the lights up anyways. Does anyone know a way to set up a light so it will NOT light pfx trees?
3) I posted earlier about wanting to deflect branches from the camera, and received a very helpful response from Duncan, advising me to modify the pfx CollideFunction runtime script. It worked alright, but because the camera moves so slowly, the results were very erratic -- the branches would jitter all over the place, trying to get out of the way of the camera. Any suggestions? The shot as I've arranged it now has no branches in the way, which is fine, but I'd like to be able to deflect them, if I could. Not afraid of coding something up, even if I happen to be a bit inexperienced.
Thanks much in advance!
I am doing a shot currently where the camera navigates through a forest, revealing a decrepit old church. I have noticed/had probs with the following things, consulting to the greater wisdom of CGTalk:
1) The camera moves pretty slowly past some foreground trees. The branches will occasionally shift down a foot or two inexplicably, in the middle of a render. I read about this "popping" on the Highend3d PFX FAQ, and since I am using a Mesh Brush, cannot up the stamp level. So I converted to poly, which works fine, but causes increased render times and shifts the lighting DRAMATICALLY. Did I take the right approach, and is there any way around this?
2) Because I now have to relight for the foreground poly trees, I want to add lights specifically for them. However, no matter what I do with light-linking relationships, or putting poly tree-only lights in Render Layers, the pfx trees in the bg pick the lights up anyways. Does anyone know a way to set up a light so it will NOT light pfx trees?
3) I posted earlier about wanting to deflect branches from the camera, and received a very helpful response from Duncan, advising me to modify the pfx CollideFunction runtime script. It worked alright, but because the camera moves so slowly, the results were very erratic -- the branches would jitter all over the place, trying to get out of the way of the camera. Any suggestions? The shot as I've arranged it now has no branches in the way, which is fine, but I'd like to be able to deflect them, if I could. Not afraid of coding something up, even if I happen to be a bit inexperienced.
Thanks much in advance!