Digital Art Zone

Now this is one I have never seen before. SOme of my OBJECTS seem to have disappeared. They are THERE and they are VISIBLE but do NOT show up in the ass Room.. BUT they do in the shader room and in the render.

Also if i go edit them in the shader room I can go back to the ASS room and they will be there for about 2 seconds then POOF! gone

The objects in question are the blaster shield coves and the blast shield themselves.

SEE PIC!

Yep, happens to me on occasion when objects have complex shaders/textures.  I think it’s the way Carrara sorts out open GL or something.

DA is right, it’s a limitation of the videocard and OpenGL drivers.

If you have a partial transparency (I take it the helmet decals have an alpha?) behind another transparency it will be interpreted as fully transparent in the preview. Quite an interesting effect when you orbit a camera around a scene with lots of windows and transmapped clothes.

No real issue but if you need to see the details while composing a scene just hide the ‘blocking’ object temporarily.

Well no the decals dont have any trans at all NOW the CANOPY glass does. Its is a really weird thing. Can I change to software instead of open GL ?

RichardChaos - 03 July 2012 05:37 AM

Well no the decals dont have any trans at all NOW the CANOPY glass does. Its is a really weird thing. Can I change to software instead of open GL ?

Other than rendering in the assembly room with the area render, I don’t think there is any quick fix.

Some softwares take a novel approach, like Newtech’s Lightwave and use a buffer render called “Viper” that stores render values on the fly.  Newtek took it one step further in version 11 of their software and now support true “real time” rendered view.  Unless DAZ implements a “viper” or real time render option, I can’t see that anything that can be done.

RichardChaos - 03 July 2012 05:37 AM

Well no the decals dont have any trans at all NOW the CANOPY glass does. Its is a really weird thing. Can I change to software instead of open GL ?

Are you sure? Not even a little alpha? Not even sharing a map that has alpha for some part? A layer list may count as well depending on the layer mask.

As Design Acrobat says, it’s pretty tough to sort this out and have any realtime performance. Maybe in a few years.

However, I use this method for getting quick AO renders and it may help you.

Setup a fully opaque simple white shader and save it to your browser.
Save your finalised shaders/master shaders that are giving you trouble to the browser too.
Now BACKUP your file, just in case.
Drop the opaque shader onto all of the surfaces of the offending model and save THAT new master shader into the browser.
You can now swap between base shaders and complex shaders at will.
This takes longer to type than to do and is convenient for all sorts of things including basic layer rendering, mask production and faster test renders.

My settings on the shaders

You have a texture map on the alpha.

The OpenGL driver will take a partial transparency map (this means alpha as far as the graphics card is concerned) and apply a full transparency to the whole shader domain when it runs out of transparency buffers which, from observed behaviour, is a maximum of one. I may be crossing technical terms here, it’s been a long time since I dealt with this stuff.

The thing is though, this isn’t often an issue but when it is, a structured approach can deal with it. Spot renders and the full render will give the correct result.

By the way, most preview software is limited by OpenGL in various ways, you just need to be aware of it. Remember that low end graphics cards (and I mean everything but dedicated graphics workstation cards) are meant for playing games, we just use them because they’re there.

OH SHEET that right! For the GROOVE dont the middle of the helmet! DUH! I should step away form this thing once in a while