When I try to render an object with a fiber material applied while on a layer above a layer that has been filled and then baked the fibers will only render in front of the object. The front layer is plenty far forward so that is not the issue. Is there a workaround or is this something I need to live with?
Not sure why you should be getting this. Have you got Flatten turned off in the Render palette?
Thanks Marcus,
Yes I do. I fill the first layer, then I bake it. I create another layer and place an active object and make sure it is far enough forward. I apply the fiber material to the object and render with flatten off, shadows on and do a best render. If I turn off the bottom layer the fibers outside of the object boundaries render normally.
What I ended up doing in the real picture I’m working on is exporting and reimporting to an image plane and then adding the next layer. This started because I wanted to use the same material in two different versions hence the need to bake the first layer. These active materials are not always my friend and I wish there was a way to overcome that. Sometimes I can change a material on a second object by exchanging it for a saved version of the same material with the changes after I’ve entered edit mode with the second object. For some reason I have not figured out that does not always work. I could not get that trick to work with the fiber material.
I’ve already worked around this but would like any other info about this anyone has.
I think Marcus was asking if you accidently had Flatten set off… it should be turned on. See if that doesn’t render your fiber materials properly.
Sven
Sven,
That was not the problem and this is repeatable. It is easy to work around though so I guess it’s a non issue. The active materials is built in and sometimes is an advantage and sometimes not. I find myself using the colorized tri-shader a lot their are times I wished there were a half dozen of them available.
Materials are only active if they occupy the same slots. If you save out all your adjusted materials with unique names then, as long as the areas that you want the different materials on have different slots, you can load them in and render the image without baking and without the different areas updating to all the same material. You may find it easier to create the materials separate from your main document. Then just use (for example) slot 2 [Basic Material] for one loaded material, slot 3 [Basic Material2] for the next, and so on.
My MatSlots plugin makes selecting unused material slots easy.
I bumped this to thank Marcus - This little bit of info evaded me for some time and this simple explanation cleared it up in one paragraph. Thought his explanation might help others trying to figure this out.