Long pipes

[craiggorton]

I have 2 long pipes of .75" diameter in a model of a yacht. (They are 16 foot whip antennas.) The model is in inches and these are .75" diameter pipes that are 105" long. When I zoom extents and render the yacht, I am losing parts of these antennas. I can zoom in and see them in the rendering.
Do I need some custom mesh settings (mine is usually just dist. to surface = 0.01")?
Why do they disappear? I've tried no AA filter, area 1.5, catmull rom, higher max rate. Used IM+LC and IM+QMC.

Help!

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Long pipes

Pixel, pixels, pixels...If those antennas are that thin and I assume you are rendering at a relatively low resolution (<1600x1200) then the problem is that they are probably not even being described by 1 pixel. If thats the case, then no amount of AA samples (AQMC, ASubD, or other wise), filters , or what have you are going to make those antennas reappear. The only thing that can really help it are more pixels. Although pixels are the best thing for it, using blurry methods (IR and LC are blurry methods) doesn't really help either. You can get by with them, but I've seen small details such as holes "disappear" because of IR.

Unfortunately this is all bad news, but the fewer pixels that are used to describe an object, the harder its going to be to try to get a representation that you're satisfied with.

[craiggorton]

Re: Long pipes

One word: "pixels."

Yes, you're right. I was at 800x600 and switching to 1600x1200 works. But it's interesting that my frame buffer also switched down to 50% and I can still see the antennas correctly. So the frame buffer can downsample where the renderer cannot? What do I know?

Anyway, problem solved- thanks.