If you want to keep the alpha channel clean for compositing then it's best to add the white background after you have rendered.. Using the 2d background color / toon paint trick ( works :) ) leads to the white background adding a halo effect around the object due to the anti aliasing picking up the ...

Really not sure if a Toyota Hilux is the best example.. from life experience yeah they last forever but not in a good way for the end user... this is purely me talking about the truck but lol, yes its great for farm owners etc - people that don't have to use it, usually most hated by the people that...

Nice advice, to add to this I would recommend the damn cool UV mapping per face addon.. http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1643 Just make a simple tex like white middle, black outline in photoshop then map that to every poly... create a new pass and select background obje...

hmm, so can I just shove on immed purely for uvs / enveloping ?.. don't usually have a need for a live stack on either.. hmmmms :) I do freeze what I'm not using as I work, after each save when I remember.. I guess am scared if I start to use immed again, I might make a mistake, like somewhere where...

Dunno if immed mode is necessary ?, I always forget its even an option hehe. get used to the kind of things that will destroy a live stack and how to avoid for the most part. I do save every 5mins to a new file tho just in case hehe, yay for ever increasing hdd sizes ;) Edit: constant saves to new f...

Never underestimate the 'progress' :). You are right :), sorry.. just doubt these kinda things(and am depressin scotsman hehe), maybe even 70-90% could be improved to 100% with a few filters and 5mins work.. gueass I should be looking forward to any new improvement in an area that in my mind has go...

It could be good yes, but as you admit it's never going to do everything. I have seen promising new ideas, some that can even finally do hands and fingers... I dunno though, the actual weighting part of a character rig I find gets done fast, I'm honestly not sure if a better algorythm would speed up...

I'm not sure what the best practice is besides checking uv remaps settings etc... Is it a case of you have dumbed down the explanation for something more complex ?.. if not there's always this... http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1643 creates a uv map of exactly 0-1 for ...

hehe, sorry if I went overboard on the explanation, it's just a shaderball is a representation of how your surface will look when rendered, if you adjust scene's ambience settings and the material still has an ambient setting that isn't black then in my mind of course it will show in the render ball...

generally when something goes this kinda wrong I find it a case of trying to seperate the parts I have, polygon data / envelope weights, then try to combine again into a new mesh, those tricks I mentioned are the fastest ways I have found, there are others though. The rig is the 3rd part but that ca...

No worries hehe, I was starting to suspect something was properly wrong before I made the vid, its all a case of rule out the obvious though ! :). have you tried the tricks I outlined under the first video post ?, starting "One quick way to create a new mesh with a hopefully clean stack is to&q...

hmm, if you search for stefano on rray.de you get http://sjannuz.com/sj_radio/doc/sj_radio.html , think you need to get the local backup from rray though... if it still actually works in 2014's version of mray tho... hmm :) .. it might be so old that its a case of re-building the spdl / whatever lib...

the ambience setting is a control over how much ambient light / fake made up flat evil light each material in scene gets.. generally you want this to be close to black. Every material in xsi has an ambient setting that basically defines how much ambient light it can receive. I think the default is 0...

not sure, have you enabled enough transparency ray depths ?.. under optimization you really want quite a high refraction and due to that combined value... like refraction set to hundreds if not thousands if you are wanting decent fg + ao using particles hehe, enough to cover every one onscreen at th...

cant you just create the effect with particles ?...

Say you have a pirate with a big pirates cape hehe, gets hit by cannonball, his clothes / body you would see very localized damage.. the cape you would want an exit cannon ball wave front / deform size that is larger than the actual canon ball ?, kind of thing ? :) .. cape would bloom out and flap a...