Rich_Winsor

I believe @lbuttery has worked on this kind of project. He might have a lead for you.

Looks good to me Glenn. I don't know about the others but I'll give ya a +1 for the effort. What really caught my eye however was the "close but no banana" reference. Is that a Southern Hemisphere thing? Maybe with smoking so out of favor the trusty old "close but no cigar" in no longer acceptable.

If you don't want to roll your own (so to speak) Chief has some distressed and rustic materials available in their Bonus Catalogs. You might have a play with them and see if you can find something useful there.

Or maybe a good reason to upgrade to a Windows rig..... OK OK, just joking, lord knows you Apple guys can be touchy.

Seems like a lot of work for a God awful effect. If it's for a faithful representation of the existing condition, yeah, spatter it with MR's. If it's for anything else, ditch the effect. JMHO

Like this? I may have misunderstood the question.

Very impressive. Did you model that door in Chief as well? Looks like you are definitely in good hands as far as the fabrication goes. The Live Oak Estates are really our inside joke. They are actually a pair of 480 sq ft one bedroom, one bathroom rental units that we are now passing off as an exclusive gated community.

Nice Job JB. At 20' I'm assuming that gate is going to be a slider. Will you need to put a horizontal bar near the top for the rollers to ride on? It can detract from the intended design. While no where near as ornate, I too designed a 12' x 7' entry gate for the duplex on our property. It turned out pretty nice. Hope you have a good metal guy to bring it to life.

??? That's the tire symbol you made. BTW, that EPDM rubber material ray traces very nicely.

Perhaps I should have chosen my words more precisely. Would "one can get a surprisingly believable old tire that mere mortals could never model in Chief" have been more appropriate? That's a damn fine tire Michael but I will still maintain that for my particular situation my cheesy 2D image works better. If I needed to model the tire in 3D I guess I should model the dragonfly in 3D as well. Does that tire look familiar?

What the heck Mike. That free cup of Joe in the morning doesn't do it for you? Maybe you need a good soak in the indoor heated pool.

So here is the original cropped image I purloined off the internet to use for an old tire. I didn't really notice the little guy on the left side of the tire until I was editing the image. Using PSP I reversed the image to match the sun direction in my camera view, edited out the web site watermarks and changed the water surface to a transparent background. Then I changed the color to match the terrain. Convert the .PNG file to a Chief image and sink it into the terrain a couple of inches and you get a surprisingly believable old tire that you could never model in Chief.

I too like to 'dress the scene' with a combination of both 2D images and 3D objects. Here is a 100% Chief image I have been playing with recently. All of the items in the 'debris field' were created in this manner. In this case the main point of adding the debris was to disguise the transition between the terrain and the backdrop. BTW, bonus points are available if you can spot the dragonfly in the scene.

What are the odds? It's the +1420 Club.

Sheepishly admitting that I never even opened the file. Check with @Greg_NY61. He supplied the file. BTW, how is it that dogs can look sheepish?

Thanks Greg. Let's see if @ericepv can use this.

Personally I'd rather see models of Orthodox Jewish Men. What is the end game (exit strategy) for this charade? How do I opt out?

Armageddon it. Now we know how the dinosaur's felt. Thursday the sky was so dark that by 3:30 in the afternoon all the outside lights that are on photo cells came on.

When I was just getting started with Chief I was struggling with trying to create a swaybacked roof. Bill Emery helped me to accomplish it using Polyline Subtraction. Along the way I too encountered some unusual results.

Well. for the record I was just taking the ball Chopsaw threw out there and running with it. For anyone interested the process involved opening the image from Briarcliff in PSP and cropping out the door frame. I also took the liberty to convert the door glass in the image to a transparent background. Then in Chief I converted the PSP image into a material and applied it to a plain slab door. I wasn't sure if it would work, but applying the material to the door cut a transparent hole in the slab for the glass window. The transparent window glass and an actual 3D handle on the door go a long way to convincing the mind that the door isn't just a flat image. And thanks for the kind words Michael. .

Geeze, picky picky picky. I just grabbed the wrong (uncropped) image when i was making the new material for the door. Does this one float your boat?

Something like this?

That picture doesn't do it any favors. Are they building a dungeon?

Hey PT. This is quite a wide ranging question. There are a lot of variables that can come into play here. What type of "render" are you using? For my money ray tracing will yield the best results for you. For starters make sure the "reflections" box is checked in the Camera Spec. DBX for the camera you are using. Then you can change the Material of the counter top to one of the glass types in the Core Catalogs. You should also have a play with the different Material Classes in the Define Material DBX using the rainbow (Adjust Material Definition) tool. In this quick example I used a Custom Counter Top set to 1/2 inch thick and changed the Material to "Smoked Glass". I then used the rainbow tool to change the Material Class to "Transparent". I also bumped up the "Index of Refraction" to exaggerate the effect. Hope this gives you something to work with as I don't like to see unanswered questions here on the forum.

All I have to say about this thread is that I'm glad I don't have anything to add.