Transparent Object Showing Black

Problem: Why does tS insist on showing the object as black when it's not in front of another object?

Shane Davison, daviso@cs.uregina.ca

TrueSpace will make an object black if it has any refraction and there's no objects behind it. To put it simply, the renderer has trouble dealing with refractions and backgrounds - something about inability to determine correct distance (among other things). Just use a large sphere or plane as your background.

Render Limit Guidelines

Mike Vanderlaan, mikev@neosoft.com

Truespace has a distance limit from the camera to an object beyond which the object will not be rendered. In other words, if you get an object too far from the camera, renderings won't show it. Here's a table of approximate distance limits for the various coordinate systems:

• meters: 508
• inches: 20000
• feet: 1666
• yards: 555
• miles: .316
• points: 1,440,000

Changing to a different coordinate system doesn't help because Truespace automatically scales to the new coordinate system for you. If you already have an image that is encountering this problem, the workaround is to glue everything together and scale it down.

Render "Notch Filter"

Brian Hickey, redbaron@fn.net

Unfortunately, Truespace doesn't have a clipping plane render, where you drag a rectangle over your view and the program renders only within the box. One work-around is to create a plane object with a square hole cut in the middle to reveal the desired section of the scene. The plane can be glued to a camera and saved as an object for just this purpose. If the "matte plane" is a solid color with flat shading enabled, tS will render it very quickly, so your overall render time is greatly reduced. Also, the flat shading will enable you to easily crop out the matte and/or composite the image in post-production. You will want to be careful of the the plane object causing unwanted reflections in your scene however.