Here’s a fun one! Ever wanted to re-create the look of heavy “toon” outlines, but didn’t have a shader for it? Believe it or not, there’s an easy way to fake it using fixed-function only.

Here’s how to do it:

• Make sure all your surface normals are unified (facing outwards) and your polygons are set to 1-sided
• Make a copy of your object and resize it so it is ever-so-slightly larger than the original
• On the copy, set the surface material to black
• Invert the surface normals

That’s it! Nifty, eh? The method’s not perfect–for best results, stick to convex objects–but it’s great for quick renders and on limited hardware platforms where shaders aren’t an option.

From time to time, people ask me how to “cut edges” in AC3D since the way AC3D handles edges is a bit different than other programs. Usually, I use the Divide Loop plug-in which is normally the fastest, easiest way to go. But, every now and then you get an edge that isn’t well suited for Divide Loop. In these cases, I use a combination of Insert Vertex and Slice Surface.

This video shows you how:

A QUICK SIDE NOTE: It is much faster to use the hotkeys (ctrl+shift+I and ctrl+shift+L) than it is to use the menus… the whole process can be completed in only a few seconds if you use the hotkeys. However, for the sake of clarity, I use the menus in the video so you can actually see what I’m doing. 🙂

The tiny little 320×240 render of the plasma for the POV-Ray tutorial was a bit hard to see, so I did a render in 1920 x 1080 resolution for those of you interested in seeing the details. It’s still a bit compressed, but the image is a lot clearer. You’ll find it here: download the video.

Enjoy!

POV-Ray has some very powerful commands for rendering realistic plasmas and explosions, but not very many people know how to use them well. This tutorial will show you how.

(more…)

Click for larger view, or download the high-res image.

This image was 3D modeled in AC3D using the box modeling method. The textures were hand-painted (no photographs) in Corel Photopaint. The final image was rendered with Poser using image-based lighting.