Hey Guys,

Working on a 3D model of futuristic space ship, and taking some snapshots from MoI and then importing into Photoshop for some graphical manipulation. I get a lot of small defect lines when I look at the 3D model in MoI. It happens specifically where there is a three dimensional corner or edge and you see a small portion of a line that should be hidden.

Hopefully this makes sense. Here's a pic highlighting a lot of the small artifacts with red circles around them.

I've circled the areas where some artifacts are present. Is there a way to clean up the image in MoI itself so it presents a cleaner image of the model? Not sure what causes this, as you rotate the object the "artifacts" come and go and appear/disappear in certain areas.

Thoughts?

Hi Mad Hatter - I think you are referring to the "bleed through" artifact. That's when edges that are near the top surface but actually should be hidden get displayed in MoI's realtime display. That's just a regular part of how the display engine works, the depth values for edges are pulled upwards towards the eye point when they are drawn and it results in that kind of artifact. The upwards pulling is done because if it did not do it, you would instead have the opposite problem of edges being partially hidden when they should be displayed because they would be kind of "tied in depth" with the surfaces.

The display mechanism for MoI is meant mostly for use in the modeling environment and is tuned more towards doing things quickly than making final quality rendered results, so it's not really a replacement for a full quality renderer. If you bring your model into a final quality rendering program those programs will do a much more careful (and also much more time consuming) job of generating the image, they don't take shortcuts with speed as the main emphasis like a realtime display engine is designed to do.

In the future I have some ideas that may help to reduce those particular kinds of artifacts, but for now it's just a normal part of the display, it's just something to ignore while you are working on modeling.

- Michael

Thanks Michael!

Any recommendations for something that's "MoI level" in learning but for rendering? I know a lot of people use some pretty complex tools, but I've never rendered or tried to texture any of my models. I would like to learn, but having zero experience, it's a bit daunting.

I figure it took me a good couple weeks to really learn MoI to the point where I'm now pretty proficient, and I'd like some sort of rendering program that would allow me to texture and render with the same learning curve.

Thoughts/recommendations?

Hi Mad Hatter, yes it's true that many renderers can be pretty complex.

The one that comes to mind with probably the heaviest focus on being easy to use is KeyShot: http://www.keyshot.com/ , but it's pretty expensive.

For one that's not too expensive and still pretty easy to use you might want to check out SimLab Composer: http://www.simlab-soft.com/3d-products/simlab-composer-main.aspx , there is a trial version over there for testing out.

There's also a list of some free renderers on this recent thread: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=6041.1

- Michael