Preserved Topic: General 3D tutorials?

Hi guys,

Just wondering if any of you know of some general 3D rendering tutorials or explanations on the web. I'm reading your posts and most of what you are saying goes over my head...

quote:

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Also see if you can turn on caustics for that glass tube, it's throwing a flat shadow and it should be bending and focusing light behind it.

Also if you want accurate refraction, take the polys of the glass, copy them, flip them, give the inverted polys a nurface of air (black, no diffuce, no spec, 97-99% transparent, then paste the original forward facing polys back over the air ones, and merge points.

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Like, what the heck is caustics, nurface, etc... I think it's just the terminoligy that gets me.

-D

Haha, nurfaces is my misspelling of surface I tend to type fast and look at the keyboard. d:°B I also spelled diffuse wrong)

Caustics is the gathering of reflected/refracted light by an object. If you shine a light on a glass of water for instance, the shadow won't be solid black, but it will have spots of bright light and streaks form the light being bent through the glass and the water. Sort of like a magnifying glass focusing sunlight to a point.

Here is a sample of what caustics can do for an image.


You can tell the bottom picture looks better because of the gathering and focusing of light.

-Electro

Caustics rock. Unfortunately, I finally got my Win2k partition on the new machine set up, and found out the dongle for Mental Ray is fried. I'll have to wait till they can ship me a replacement before I have any software capable of it.

Too bad Das, now that's something i could help you with

-D

Aaahhh...i wish MAX could do caustics...anyone know of a plug that can do it?

As for general 3D tutes...try http://www.3dcafe.com or http://www.find3d.com for lots and lots of tutes, from beginners to advanced, modelling, animation and Spesh Effects.

Cheers




Computer Senility. I had a friend once who had it. His name was Gilbert, but he prefered it if people called him 'Ramases Niblick the third...Kerplunk, Kerplunk, Whoops! Wheres my thribble?'... - Kryton, Red Dwarf.

Thanks Skarjj, any idea why I can never see your sig? Probably the companies smart (make that dumb) filter.

-D

[This message has been edited by Drakkor (edited 03-23-2001).]

Either that or geocities manages to be working and to be fucked at the sme time.




Computer Senility. I had a friend once who had it. His name was Gilbert, but he prefered it if people called him 'Ramases Niblick the third...Kerplunk, Kerplunk, Whoops! Wheres my thribble?'... - Kryton, Red Dwarf.

Geocities blocked image linking a few weeks ago.

Edit: Odd, I see now that you're using the 'fp' hack to get around the image linking block, yet I still can't see the sig *shrug*

[This message has been edited by Das (edited 03-23-2001).]

No...the strange thing is that if you visit http://www.geocities.com/freizah/skaarjj-sig-12.gif and then relaod this page...my sig magically appears.




Computer Senility. I had a friend once who had it. His name was Gilbert, but he prefered it if people called him 'Ramases Niblick the third...Kerplunk, Kerplunk, Whoops! Wheres my thribble?'... - Kryton, Red Dwarf.

BE MY FRANKENSTEIN

i followed the links to http://www.3dcafe.com/ and that site has links to tutorials,
but the other link http://www.find3d.com has nothing there...

i did find a lot of tutorials at http://3dgraphics.about.com/