Hello Jimbo,

At this point SSS is object wide and not controllable by texture map. (although I hope it might be in another release) It hasn't really been an issue for me though if the ears are truly modeled to be thin. Combining that with translucency has been pretty successful.

3D motion blur is good but you pay a price in render time and it does take a little pre-planning of your scene. Carrara's scheme is to calculate the frames before, after or both (user choice) and then is blended together into a single frame. You can specify quantity of frames calculated for the effect. But you need to allow motion time in your scene on both sides of the animation or single frame to acheive this effect.

The benefit to doing this is that the shadows of the moving object are also blurred plus getting a very good result for movement over objects or through transparency. Here is the impact on render time though: A 10 frame render with a 5 frame "after" blur will calculate 50 frames to get the final result of 10 blurred frames. A "forward" and "after" blur will resulte in 100 frames of calculation. So, it's an option to be used intelligently.

I usually try to split the motion blur chore between Carrara and Final Cut Pro depending on how much time I have or how long the animation will be on visible. Where blurs need to occur on the other side of glass (think a ping pong ball moving behind a water glass) Carrara is the best fit for the job. However, for some complex scenes where the moving object is in front of everything, I'll actually render a Carrara background and the moving object separatley and do the blur completely in post production.

For still images, I simply let Carrara do all the work.

Hope this wasn't too much information!

Mark

Message edited on: 12/10/2005 10:46