gfriedman

im trying to do something very simple but every attempt I make leads nowhere. I have a rectangular black and white image I want to use as an opacity map, it even has the same proportions as a single rectangular panel. I have tried UVW mapping in both Face mode and XYZ to UVW mode but neither are helping. It seems like doing something this straightforward should be a cinch - and obviously I'm overlooking something. I have also tried to recreate my geometry thinking that it might clean up any underlying UVW co-ordinate problems - nothing. any advice? thanks!

no I have not. this I will try. I did not know you could use noise mod in the bump slot. I was applying it to the gemoetry itself, but I found I could not a get a good handle on its behaviour. and the uvw map per face - should I use a script for this? am I just setting them to different channels of a muti id material?

i would like my silicon-butt-joined glass facade to have the slight variations in reflections that a real facade would have - glass is never perfectly flat and reflections 'break' from one panel to the next. What's the best way to do this? Noise modifier? something in the texture itself? Anyone know of any good tut's for this??? thanks

yes and no. I agree abo experimenting. the problem i foresee is that hdri's are mindividual moments in time. so it would work if i had an animated hdri (does such a thing exist) - because the sun is moving across the sky it would be wrong for the hdri to remain fixed over the cycle - right? see what I'm saying?

vray, sorry i forgot to mention...

can hdri's be combined w/the daylight system? or rather, say i wanted to make a sun simulation and I wanted to tie the intesity of the reflection of an environmental hdri in the reflection channel to the height of the sun - is this a possibility?

does anyone have any good tut's on doing a sun study animation? I too have figured out the linking of the sun system to the vray sun but having never done a vray animation I don't know what settings I need to be thinking of...

from playing around I think it must've been number 1 actually. I never touch my subdivisions in my materials...but when i trimmed out the material it seems to have worked. I didnt know that this could be an issue. thanks so much

no, that solves things. could it be these massive jpegs? they are like 60 mb and 15000px x 15000px...i know that sounds ridiculous - i wasnt sure of a better way to texture my road...

im totally baffled - it's neither of those things...I'm going to see if i can package the file up with textures to be attached here

ok. i think I found the culprit - but the problem may be slightly different than what you were suggesting. I am having trouble with a couple of elements I recently merged into my model - boths were large stretches of sidewalk and roade and in order to texture them i made massive jpegs in the aerial view. This seemed to be the only way to deal with irregularities in the road and the roundings at corners. So what is it with these textures that could be problematic and how can I fix it? They are both vray materials btw...

thanks for that. I'll check that out. Are there any tools in max for analyzing that sort of stuff - that could help locate the particular object or material causing the problem?

Hi For some reason when I go to render my scene the time estimate for building the light cache just perpetually climbs reaching many many hours - i have a feeling it's actually hanging and not processing. I dont think my scene is particularly complicated. Any ideas why this might be happening, and how I might stop it? thanks!

anybody figure out how to batch psdmanager output, meaning specifically how to give each render its own unique name without standing by the computer and waiting - i desperately need this, and there doesn't seem to be any documentation on it anywhere...help?

yes, i tried reset pivot but that returned the pivot the world z, which is not what i want. I will try resetxtransform.