Old Brain Can't Smooth in 3D toolkit

[Ron Tucker]

Hi, I'm a new user with an old brain - 3D toolkit. I'm stumped on what's happening with smoothing in a project:
Imported FormZ model, anim works fine, able to apply textures.
Problem: Render doesn't smooth cylindrical objects. I've done a test project with one of the objects from the main project and it works fine. I've set all parameters i.e. render settings, prefs etc. in the main to match the test, but I must be missing something.
Is there a key setting that controls smooth rendering?

Thanks for any help.

Ron
:confused:

[kevin schmidt]

Ron,

Let's see if we can teach your old brain some new tricks. ;)

First off, I need some more specifics to better understand the exact problem you are experiencing...

As I understand it... you are having difficulty rendering smooth shaded cylindrical objects in the 3DTK (OS9?) Could you please post a sample render of what IS working and what IS NOT working?

I was a bit confused by your comments about what was, and was not working... please clarify.

If you are importing objects from FormZ there is one thing that may help... option-click the 'assume correct normals' checkbox to set it to 'force correct normals' in the import dialog box.

-kevin

[Ron Tucker]

Thanks Kevin. Yes, it's 3DTK and os9.0.4.
I tried re-importing (import, not add) the model from formZ (saved as fact using a set of export parameters I found in David Rindner's FormZ book) and then 3DTK saved it as .fac.
This seems to have solved the smoothing problem. I didn't option click the "normals" button (did this work before your post) but the model didn't need it.

My specific problem is solved. Now I'll have to learn the other 3000 lessons needed to make a successful animation.

I'm deep in the bowels of what I thought would be a "simple" anim of a gear assembly that starts out with a flyby past an exploded view of the machine, ending with all the parts coming together in 4 stages with each rotating to show the gear speed reductions and final product.

I have to leave the project for a few days but I'll no doubt be back for help on parent/child relationships and keyframes (having some timing surprises here), and how to handle rendering buffers and memory (getting render aborts due to memory issues even though I've given EI nearly 700mb).

I'll try to find answers in the docs etc before posting silly questions, but may need to be rescued from time to time.

Thanks for jumping in, your advice was right on target.

Cheers
Ron:)

[spike1201]

Quick comment...
You said that you've given EI nearly 700MB of RAM. In case you didn't know, Animator doesn't render your images. It launches a third and separate application called Camera that renders the frame/animation and returns the results back to Animator as it quits. If you're getting rendering abortions, try finding Camera in your Electric Image folder and boost it's RAM preferences (you may have to decrease Animator's RAM to insure you're not going too high when the two are open at the same time).

[Ron Tucker]

Thanks Spike, I've set Camera for 250mb, it was at its default of about 25.
I'll post whether it solves the memory problem. One of those simple things that I hadn't yet realized.

Cheers
Ron;)

[Ron Tucker]

Hi Spike, the memory added to Camera worked...I can now render the file. Thanks again.

Ron;)

[kevin schmidt]

Originally posted by Ron Tucker
what I thought would be a "simple" anim of a gear assembly that starts out with a flyby past an exploded view of the machine, ending with all the parts coming together in 4 stages with each rotating to show the gear speed reductions and final product.

Sounds like you may be better off 'doing the math' for the rotations in a spreadsheet and then cutting and pasting custom frames for the 4 shafts.

You may be able to set a couple of key frames and get away with it, but the shafts will need to remain at constant speeds throughout the animation sequence to pull it off. And you'll have to dig a bit to ensure there is no ease-in or ease-out.

EI presently doesn't have expressions that allow you to write in the 'animation rules' needed for gears.

Give a Holler when you need more help

-kevin