Sean O"Skea

Thank you to both of you. mjm the cyc in your rendering looks great I will give that a try as well. --Sean

Nothing like posting a question to help you find the answer. Way down at the bottom of the Obj Info setting for the area light there is a check box labeled ?Render Geometry? un-checking this box and cranking up the dimmer to around 1000 seemed to fix the problem. But I got to thinking about the Glow option on the reflectivity channel and I created a texture with a pale blue color and set the Glow to 100% (higher started to wash out the color) and applied that texture to the cyc object. I turned out all the front lights and sure enough a lovely background glow silhouetting my image props perfectly in Renderworks. I suspect this will render faster than the huge area light and it would also be easy to drop an image instead of the color for other cyc effects as well. --Sean O'Skea

I?m having an issue using image props in front of area lights. I typically convert a NURBS curve to an area light to serve as a lit cyclorama for my scenic model renderings. Recently I?ve begun to have issues with image props placed in front of that area light. When I use a prop with a mask (an image of a human for example) I attach a black mask on the grayscale-transparent and my figure looks terrific in Open GL standing in front of the cyc (area light) but as soon as I kick it up to any renderworks style the mask stops working and I get a black box around my figure anywhere it overlaps the cyc. If I place the figure in front of an opaque object it looks great as it does if I turn off the area light attached to the cyc object. The mask even works for the lower half of my figures where the stage floor is behind them. Is there a way to fix this? Interestingly when I sent the file to Cinema 4D the exact same thing happened?but not with all of them! Some figures looked great, some had the mask showing yet all were created in exactly the same way. Any answers anybody? Thanks

The secret to the solid subtraction has to do with the Automatic Working plane mode being on. It?s toggled off and on with the \ key. You have to hit the backslash key look and make sure it says ?Automatic? in the Active Plane field up in the view bar (if it says ?No active plane? or anything else it won?t work). Then you draw your square or whatever shape on the surface of the main object. Then immediately move the cursor into the 2d shape to get the red highlight. Then click. Then hold down the Alt. Then drag for your subtraction. Then click to complete. Then let up on the alt. Wow is it fussy. Mattheng is right, if you interrupt the operation in any way, it won?t work. I can?t get it to work if I draw the object, do something else, select Push/Pull and try to make a subtraction. Selecting the Push/Pull tool kicks you out of Automatic mode and it won?t allow you to go back with the tool selected. It looks real sexy on the new features video, but it?s so fussy I?m not sure it?s that much better than old school Ctrl-Alt-S Sean

I'm having the exact same issue! Just installed VW 2012 and updated with the latest SP. Running Win 7. I accidentally clicked the close pallet X in the title bar of the Basic tools palette. When I went to Windows>Palettes to select the Basic Tools I was unable to restore the palette by checking next to the name. The same is true for Tool Sets. I switched to a different workspace and the basic pallet appeared, when I checked the X again to see how I could restore the Basic tools in my normal workspace (Spotlight) it too disappeared and could not be re-opened. The reverse is true for the Tool Set pallet. While visible, I am unable to hide the Tool Sets by using the Window>Palettes menu. I have restarted, updated the service pack, opened and closed various documents, made copies in the Workspace editor, nothing works. Once I close the Basic and Tool Sets in any given workspace, they disappear forever.