2d Face Me Component Problem

[galbavy1]

Actually I have 2 questions perhaps somebody can help me with - I tried to search for previous posts relating to these but couldn't find anything...

1. I use tons of face me components in my renderings and sometimes when after I render with twilight, they are not ALL facing the camera for some reason, some will be turned sideways and look pretty goofy. Ill use some wider camera angles (down to 20mm) to get a more dynamic view of the landscape, but Im not sure if this is related.

2. I can't seem to get the F-Stop on the camera to work properly. I use the position scene view tool and ctrl pick the focal point as in the tutorial, and I use a 1.4 or so which should blur out the background nicely, but it doesn't work at all. Even when I use my real camera I can use a 17mm lens at about 10 feet away at F-2.8 and get a nice blured background, but I can't get it to work in twilight.

PS. My typical workflow uses the interior progressive + method. Sometimes I let it render overnight for more detail and sometimes I stop it after 10 min to bring into fotosketcher and go that route- but it doesn't seem to matter how long it renders regarding the problems above.. thanks for your help.

[Fletch]

For the face-me issue... is it possible that you are rendering a different camera view than you are seeing in your SketchUp viewport? The wideangle lens could be an issue. Is it happening with still images, or with animations? If rendering animations, faceme components will only render properly if you use "has animated objects" option in the Animation Tab of the Render Dialog.

For the F-stop, please re-read the User Manual about DOF (depth of field) and F-number settings.
I would set up a very small test scene to see if F-number is working.

[tomsdesk]

Copies of face-me's seem to render all the same...i.e. they all render facing the direction of the original component inserted into the model. Try making each component copy "unique".

[Chris]

Copies of face-me's seem to render all the same...i.e. they all render facing the direction of the original component inserted into the model. Try making each component copy "unique".

We'll look into that. I wasn't aware that was happening; it shouldn't be because each component instance has it's own "transform" (meaning position, orientation, and scale), and Twilight uses each instance's transform individually.

EDIT: Post more if you have any additional info. I haven't been able to reproduce this issue.

[tomsdesk]

I'm talking about components copied from components already "insert"ed in the model, rather than "insert"ing another instance of the component each time...not sure how the latter works since I seldom work that way.

[galbavy1]

What is strange is that 95% of the face me's will face the camera most the time but some will not. So what your saying is that I need select all the face me's (about 1000 trees per say) and make all of them unique? Ill play around with it and post back on here when I have time to work on a model again. Ill also set up a little experiment to test the camera thing again. Thanks for your help.

[Chris]

You shouldn't have to make them all unique. For the ones that aren't facing the camera, is it always the same ones? Does it always happen? Are you doing an animation or batch rendering?

[Fletch]

please post a very small scene with one that faces the cam and one that does not... for debugging purposes.
if the facemes are proprietary, you can send the scene to support at twilightrender dot com

[galbavy1]

You shouldn't have to make them all unique. For the ones that aren't facing the camera, is it always the same ones? Does it always happen? Are you doing an animation or batch rendering?

This is it! If I select each component and make each unique, they all render correctly in twilight. This is a pain because I can't universally change the component again. I typically bring in thousands of blocks (plant symbols) that are arranged per my layout plan, import them into sketchup, then double click into them and insert the 2d face me component of choice. If there is a better way to work this method then let me know....

[Chris]

It sounds like you have nested components, the outside is a "block" and the inside is a face-me component. Is that correct?

If so, then that makes sense. In order to have the most optimization when rendering, Twilight Render takes a "snapshot" of each component (it's more complicated than that, but basically). Everywhere that component is used in the scene, Twilight Render uses the snapshot; it makes sure to correctly scale and orient that snapshot for each instance. However, if you have nested components, and the geometry inside the component (ie. a face-me component inside another component) is constantly changing from instance to instance, you won't see that change because the geometry inside the component is frozen when the snapshot is taken.

There are two options that should fix the problem.
1. Make the block itself a face-me component, not the component inside it. Then the orientation of each block will be updated and captured correctly and you can still use them as instances.
2. This may or may not work, depending on your geometry: In the render window, in the Advanced tab, under Grouping Method, choose "Per Material". This means Twilight Render doesn't take snapshots of each component but you loose the optimization; it will take longer to load and render (if you really have thousands of trees, it will take a lot longer).

Hopefully that makes sense and will work for you.