Bug in 6.6 SP2 ? 2004-03-01 - By Kris Krieger
Back
At 03:23 PM 22-02-04, Ed Baker wrote:
>Regarding my issue with multi layered materials and global reflections. I
>just opened the scene in 6.0 and the layered material reflected the global
>environment just fine. Apparently 6.6 might have a bug.
I haven't tried 6.6 yet much, because I'[m working on a scene in 6.5 and
got this worry that installing .6 over .5 might muddy up the works (dunno
why, I just got that thought, prob. for np logical reason...)
At any rate, I think what you're talking about is the shape (that you can
make a sphere, a plane, or a sort of "mini-scene" so to speak, which shows
the material look...?)
I use multilayered textures all the time, most especially with all sorts of
transparency maps/"alphas" (never got the hang of actual alphas, always get
a "black halo" effect, so I just use black and white BMP files or
sometimes, like on my current scene, 256 or even 16-mill color gradients,
depending upon what I'm doing. At any rate, the Sphere (I stick with that
or the plane, the others take too long to refresh given the way I do
things) seems to get overwhelmed once you hit a certain level of complexity
- IOW, if you have on layer 1 a texture with corresponding bump map and an
SL2 shader, then on layer 2 you have another texture/procedural, using a
transparency map (so as to, for example, give the look of gold filigree on
a velvet wall, such as those at I think it's Versailles) for teh color, the
bump, and the reflectance (so as to make the gold shiny but not the wall)
and then you have a third layer with, oh, let's say some smudgy stuff to
make it look like there was a fire, using a third texture or procedural,
another transparency map for tex. and reflectance, and maybe a third bump
map as well using say a fourth transp. map....
....well, the point is, the sphere/plane starts having difficulty keeping
up with it all, in terms of showing the actual end appearance, so the only
way to really see it is use the "render portion of screen"; the
sphere/plane can only give an approximation.
But I don't know that it's a problem, so much as it's yet another area in
which I tend to push the hardware and software beyond what it can handle
well. Anyway, I can usu. picture the results in my mind about as well as
the sphere/plane can show them, or better, so I don't actually rely on it
that much. If you do rely on it, I dunno what would help you aside from
installing as much RAM as your OS and hardware (etc.) can handle, because I
do think it's a memory issue - I notice that the sphere/plane degrades as
the RAM gets "full".
HTH
- Kris
- Kris M. Krieger
http://www.pterochromics.com
|
|
