Snow tutorial
 

I have just finished the snow tutorial but i am having rendering issues
when ever i render the scene the particles just dont show
I get a message 'Warning: Hardware rendering selected for particleShape1. Skipped'
my machine isnt capable of hardware rendering so how do i make the particles use software rendering? everything else uses software rendering

The answer is that you can't, most particle types use hardware rendering and only a few use software and you can recognise those by the sw next to them indicating they are rendered in software renderer.

Is there anything i can do?
there must be something

If you can't use the hardware render buffer then to make snow then you could make some snow like geometry and instance them onto the particles and that will render in software.

thanks for the help
what kind of specs do you need for hardware rendering

Hardware rendering uses the graphics card but i couldn't tell you what the minimum spec that is required, you could get that info at the Autodesk website though.
If your card is a qualified card then I don't see why you couldn't use the hardware renderer.
What card do you have btw ?

Its an ATI radeon exspress 1100
its 128mb

tbh that shouldn't be a problem, is the scene particularly complex? hmm this is a toughy lol!

Chris

No its a pretty simple scene
when ever i try to set maya to hardware render it says the system isnt capable ' graphics card isnt insufficent'
it should be really my computers only a year old

I think the problem is that card does not support OpenGL and uses Direct X.
So you are going to be limited to not using the hardware renderer.
If you are going to go with ATI then you really need a fireGL card, but personally i prefer Nvidia when it comes to Maya as there seems to be far less issues.

dmanit
thanks fo the help
are most graphics cards capable of hardware rendering?

There is a trick to Hardware Rendering on machines that aren't best speced for it. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the book I believe the answer is in till late this week. (if anyone has Learning Maya 5-6 Fundamentals, with the bouncing ball through the (hardware rendered flaming) hoops tutorial, I believe it's in there)

so it is possible? By compter model is only 1 year old i would have thought it was easily capable

I have an ATI Radeon X300 that supports openGL but it has the same problems as you with the software render, if you figure it out let me know :beer:

Will do
any help is much appriciated

BTW can you nominate people for member of the month?