pixelplucker

It sounds like you may need to render out and do some post composting for the various effects. As far as the model goes you could model it flat and use cookie cutter and or opacity maps along with a descent bump and texture. There are 2d applications like Toonboom and Anime but I think AM has the benefits of being able to re-use actions and poses. You can rotate the whole model and the balance rig stays with the model to you can make it walk upside down. The bones can be constrained from one model to another over time and values can be on/off or percentage and keeping that in mind you would have 2 separate rigs but use one as your main and have the other follow or mimic. I would highly suggest story boarding the whole thing out even if it is crude to make things easier. I'm self employed and tend to get buried with rush jobs so to schedule out monster projects gets pretty tricky.

Do you have a sketch on the character or rough model people can see? There is a good chance you can rig it yourself since rigging in AM isn't as scary as many think. For characters that don't typically fit the biped form you can use TSM2 rigging system found here http://www.anzovin.com/products.html This should allow you to rig complex character types. If your rigging a typical biped then the 2008 rig may be better for you and allow you to use actions on other characters that use the same rig. This is a greatly improved rig that is similar to the 2001 rig which is pretty much outdated for most the folks. Rigging in AM is fairly straight forward and there are tons of support in the rigging section of the forums. As far as 2d characters you can usually use the same 3d models and simply render them as toons. The toon render mode is really nice in AM and produces very smooth curves on the outlines especially compared to poly based models. I may be able to help with the model but can't commit to time because work always interferes with the fun stuff.

Lookin pretty good, i would accelerate the camera coming in and then ease it so it doesn't abruptly stop.

You could simply map the stars on a sphere with the normals inward and rotate it. Make sure the rest of the scene is inside the sphere and shadows are off on it etc.

That is pretty dang slick, does it render faster than pure geometry based treads? Many years ago I had to do an animation that had a conveyor belt, I used deformations to conform the objects to a belt shape which caused some distortion on the height. Back then displacement mapping wasn't all that great in EI and required high Dicer values to smooth things out.

Cool looking ship, I love the engines. Is there really a need for bevels? usually space scenes have one main light and sharp shadows, not sure how beneficial a bevel would be on edges unless the edges are substantially large.

Nice render Stain and thanks for the compliments

Happy B-Day!

Think it was the dark evil queen in this case.

Thanks, I just realized that the king and queen are transposed... Shows you how long its been since I played chess lol

all fixed

oops shes sitting on a knight, can just delete the extra model

Fantastic textures.... that the new leatherette/spandex?

Posted the model in the contrib cue http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...view=getnewpost

Looks like Depth of Field ignores furballs and maybe because furballs don't have any polygons to determine their exact location which may also explain why I keep finding them all over my house.

Cutplane works but the edge tools works on selected edges so you don't add across the entire model as well as create edges starting from selected edge and work outward.

This is what edge tools do, just a quick and simple demo edgetool.wmv

I don't use Zevel, it crashes too much here so I manually create the bevels. Sweet job with textures and details on that ship Dark! That looks awesome!!!

Sorry it doesn't vibrate but you can make it jiggle if that tickles your fancy. I posted it in the contrib corner. I modeled this in AM just to see if I actually could and also because I wanted to sharpen some of my non boolean techniques. I did find that building with extra splines makes the bias handles more stable and they tend to get tweaky if you have long edges and beveled edges. Maybe in the future someone can make some edge tools that would allow us to extract an edge along a perpendicular edge rather than tessellating a series of edges and stitching them back together. It would speed the process up and be invaluable. Also on my wish list is undo-able and mirrored bias handle manipulations. Booleans are not a big deal to work around if you model your positive and negative shapes then stitch them together. Thanks for the comments. Dark.... post a render of your ship, love to see it.

Thanks, I modeled the letters for the buttons. I'll do bump maps for the text that is embossed. I did leave out the screw holes on the bottom thinking that your not supposed to take these apart anyways hehe. Couple small kinks to take out and I'll toss it in the contrib cue if anyone wants it. This is definately a tough one to make because of all the button holes, drove me a little crazy sorting out hooks and patches.

Thought I would give my brain a work out, still needs some small tweaks and textures but coming together.

I'll try to find out where and how much they go for. I have one here I have to return to the customer. Actually not a bad item though I think it would be pretty useless on a bar stool hehe.

Here is how the product sheet turned out in case anyone cares

Had to make this for a job I'm working on, photography of the object didn't give me the flexibility of composing it over other photos and renders so now I atleast have an alpha to use to make the shots go easier textures were done in paintshop pro and the model was done mostly with decals and the frame painted in 3d paint.

I'll check it out, glad to hear your sticking with it.