some things should not require a signature.......i can understand your side of it ofcourse, and in your place wouldn't sign either, but a part of me (you probably would too) would want to see it as long as you weren't the one to fall for it =P

you should've asked for a copy of it, the great memories! :)

note to self, UK sucks =P

400 views already! so many that were afraid to post after they fell for it lol

nice try wheatpenny but have to do better =P

Quote - The only render engine I know of that can accurately render diamonds (including light dispersion) is Maxwell Render by Next Limit Technologies. Worth taking a look in their gallery,

accually many render engines can do gems, i mainly use carrara5, and does it quite well. the tools in most of the 3d apps contain the tools to do most everything, it's just a matter of simplicity. Poser i am sure would be capable of doing caustics if someone was bored enough to sit in mat room for 3 months and figure out the 1000+ nodes in the right order :) carrara5 however has that built in already, but does not take into account the "prism" effect when determining colors. it does however have the tools needed to program a plugin to do it, and much more simply. so the question is not of capability, but rather simplicity and value of doing it.

i despise tapes, and consider my 1 book (400 cd/dvd space) easy enough to carry lol

prefer the random access ability of cd/dvd :) and yes i've noticed software is coming towards dvd now, just bought a couple games with multi dvd o.0 makes me wonder if some game studios are getting sloppy on programming since the hardware is growing lol

plus i don't like having too much info in 1 place, i think current dvd will be my limit, and if blu-ray gets cheaper, i'd burn 2 copies of the same, for same reason i don't just use 500GB harddrives. if 1 gets a problem, for whatever reason, and no extra copy (which currently i have a backup to a external drive, and a copy on dvd) then bye bye when drive crashes =P

i'm still waiting for isolinear data rods from startrek......have usb data sticks, so getting closer

on a side note, could also plug a "slight domed shaped" pattern into the displacement for the lens, to get the bulge and easily edit the curve shape to what is desired. i do this approach for the ease of changing the curve, but if you aren't good in mat room, or the lens glass isn't uv mapped right, it can easily turn out very wrong

i did this with V3 a while ago, but i used blender to create the "body skin" (all but head) material, and deleted the rest (never bothered to learn the effect of double materials lol)

not sure if same can be done directly from poser though, grouping tool scares me :)

i don't know if your model is capable of good results with this, but using refraction will add the effect of glasses "bending light". add a bit of reflection to it as well, and possibly specularity depending on previous results. 

basicly look up realistic glass shaders, or read the recent thread about gems. glass and gems effect like in the same way, just need a different refraction index, to get decent results. unless you plan to go for extreme realism, which i won't go into, lots more work :) but this should get you started

Quote - Diamonds also show "fire", which is caused by the prism like splitting of light into a rainbow. You can get some of that effect as I did here by setting up a Color Ramp node with some pastel green and red in it and drive that with an Edge_Blend node. I'm showing that in the screen cap above. Thus you see some purple and green in the diamond reflections.

Hmm interesting idea, could take a quicker render from that than my way since less raytracing and 1 render instead of 3. But I wonder the difference in end result between the 2, as my way is more of what accually happens, vs a way of "faking it with a painting" so to speak.

Attached Link: this?

3 1/2 to 5 foot, has diamonds :)

small local guys are almost always polite and helpful

AOhelL is just as bad, i have some GOOD horror stories from them lol

Carrara5 also does caustics, and quite well, had some success with gems in it, and  i prefer it over vue. With the ability to program my own plugins, the software (should) never truely be obsolete for many years, until someone makes a toy that I can't program myself :)

About 2 years ago i worked with poser6 for quite awhile trying to make 3d gem materials tha look realistic. I found that poser6 can fake some effects from caustics, but not fully, and the color of the gem (ruby, emerald, etc) effected the results a bit, diamonds since clear, i couldn't for the life of me make one to my satisfaction. 

Ruby filters red light, emerald filters green (using most known colors, but for those who don't know, there are tons more colors, seen blue diamond in titanic? hehe rare but exists =P) but diamond, the most common clear one, filters no light, and each wavelength (color of light) going into it, goes in a slightly different direction, just like a prism.Shine a light through a prism, and you get a rainbow on the wall :) Effect of this is giving diamonds a "living fire" inside, if cut right. 

Closest i came to diamonds was to render 1 map of my scene with the usual raytracing needed (ignoring diamond quality), then set all lights to have only their red light, area render with raytrace to MAX, just the diamond area, cut and paste to a paint program, do again for green light, but slightly different refraction on the gem material, and a 3rd with blue light and different refraction. Put the 3 color cuts together should look normal, paste it in the first rendered picture that's you're scene. Tada! Without caustics though, it isn't perfect, you won't get reflected light effects you see from a spoon on a table, but its a little step forward.

Now a Ruby isn't always a perfect red, emeralds not always a perfect green, so the above method can help with that as well, just remember the light values you had set :)

Everywhere I have read, says that burning slower can avoid problems, and burning over the rated speed (ie burning a 4x at 16x) makes the problems. Atleast on older drives this was true, due to the material used in the disks, since the laser has to "burn" the information on. Running at too fast of speed, would leave the laser too short of time to "burn" the mark on the dvd/cd. Running at lower speeds, can have the laser either run at less power, or so i'm told, never had the will to take a screwdriver and see what makes them tick :)

But I never have a problem, and have burned almost 200 DVDs in the past 6 months, not one coaster, drive is 16x and I usually burn at 8x or 4x, so without seeing his computer first hand, all i can say is what is different from what I do.

would love this but where do i get it?:P can't find a download link :)

Never did figure out the difference between +/- R DVDs, people always just sais to use - and I'm too lazy to look considering I haven't needed to buy any after my first load of 200 -R gifted to me :) so unsure of the effect of +R

I run verification on all disks I burn, never had a problem since the day nero6 came out, so I would suggest buying a single DVD-R to just test it, maybe 50 cents? and even though the burner runs at 18x speed, i would suggest (assuming you find the option) to burn is at lower, say 4x speed, no need to push the limits when you don't know that everything works perfectly below the limits. If you still get errors after that, I'd say hardware/software issue. Wether or not the data is indeed intact and fully usable, and error is just due to the verification scanner itself, there are ways to compare files that don't include nero.

choose burn data dvd
put in a dvd-r
burn at 4x with verification

as for testing zip files, I use winrar, not winzip, and winrar has a few more options :)  but as for winzip, you should be able to right click a file and choose "open with winzip" and a window comes up with all files in that zip. then an icon or an option in menus will say  "test" (since i can't see myself, don't know exact look/name) but that's testing them 1 by 1, files bought from daz which are exe installers, won't work with this method of checking.

edited to add: nero6 also has the option to burn to harddrive (creating a single image file) and create from image (burning the cd/dvd from that file) as suggested above