I have followed several HDR tutorials using either mapping to the sphere ambient colour or using the IBL node in mental ray. I have even used the lightgen plugin to fake it but no matter which way I...

but how do I set the weights? and so on?
My version of the book's way of doing it doesn't work.

In the seal project I was working on, the textbook called for making the seals whiskers a soft body, weighting them, and making the original shape a goal.
They are a simple nurbs object curved...

I did another render in mental ray and the geometry didn't dissapear.
I did have a minor tesselation error though causing jaggies on the water but I think I've taken care of it.
Still would like...

I was experimenting with some textures from nasa at 2048x1024 and they don't seem to give me the seam problem. I toyed with using the 8096 ones but they're frigging huge and I'm sure maya would not...

Just checked. The makenurbsphere1 reports start of 0 and end of 360. degree cubic, I upped the sections and spans to 48 each but that didn't seem to help.
I followed what was posted on the tor oera...

I have created a model of earth but for some reason there is a seam which seems to persist regardless of what I do with tesselation and the texture file looks like it's without a seam.
This appears...

I have been working through a textbook on a project called salty the seal.
I finished the project and went to render it and it started off ok, but around frame 63 of 375 it started acting strangely....