@okh
Thanks a lot to cec for steering me in the right direction.
Now, now, it was your idea in the first place! Remember?
I have been thinking about what is piloting our objective, yours being to make models as small as possible, models that are easy to handle and renders fast, while I tend to ignore both the size and the time it takes to render an image. I'm happy if my images renders over night, when I sleep, but sometimes my constructions are so complex that they take days to render, even on a twelwe-core MacPro.
Here are about two hundred and fifty light sources and over a hundred MB of textures. Original rendering is 4K. The whole tunnel-project is 7.8 GB. And this image, that took 17 hours to render, is just a backdrop, and will only be seen for about ten seconds in my video.
I think my objective is to test the limits of SH3D – find out what I can really do with this impressive peace of software. That's probably why I asked the initial question: Is it a major challenge to apply alpha-channels to sky and ground?
Sometimes I imagine how SH3D would have been with a timeline and key-frames, to enable simple animated movements.
I can clearly see the point in working with models that are easy to handle, and I sometimes wonder if I'm overdoing my models, making them bigger than they need to be. But I really tried to make my lampette as small as possible, and I'm really amazed that you were able to make it so incredibly small. I obviously have a lot to learn.
Anyway, I have a contribution I would like to make, a one-sided disc, with an opening in the middle:
Ring-InnerUp.zip
It's great for making lampshades ( and other things), and it's only 8kb. (Well, for me that's "only". If you have a way to make it smaller; go ahead.)
Here are some examples of what it can do:
cec
