Hutch

Happy B-day Rodney! Gemfire looks great. Nice simple yet effective mesh. Glad to see you use AM for more than a chat room Hope to see more soon!

The problem (at least one of them) looks like you have some control points crossing the center line.

Oh, I think I get it now but at first I thought it was saying something along the lines of "Beer makes hippos look good," which is sort of true The ball thing confused me though. Happy Nude Beer!

Your character is called Raper? I hope that means something completely different in French He looks good so far. Was he inspired by Fat Albert?

That is a very nice start. Nice looking mesh except the bottom of the rib cage looks pretty sharp. Maybe those 2 splines are too close together?

The rock seems to be spinning backward at first but I think you are on the right track with hand animating the trench.

That looks very nice! I love the colors and the lighting looks excellent.

The guy in red looks like your avatar(you I presume) with gray hair on the sides. Coincidence?

Here is an example of why my lighting is poor. In my choreography I can never tell what the final lighting will actually look like using a skylight system. I have to try a render and adjust it. I haven't done enough to know what changes are best. When import Yves skylights it seems like the intensity of the light is always way too high. I have read through his site but I guess I am too dense for it sink in properly. Anyway, I tried a 52 light rig with 8% intensity (this is how it loaded) and 7 rays. Four hours later I get my bonsai with frost!

Thanks Sharky. Here is my final version for now unless someone points out something in need of fixing. Upgraded textures on just about everything. Let me know what you think please.

Look below the post icons where it says File Attachments. You can browse to your file if it is under 1mb.

I instantly thought of that Rudolph stop motion show when I saw your Santa and I hadn't read your post. He looks really good. I like his beard now but I can see where his hands could use some work.

Thanks for all the replies. John, the translucency worked great. Thanks for the suggestion. The 2 hour render time was a bit much for me but it is the best look for the leaves I have got so far. Zaryin, my sun was at 100% and my skylight was at 7% (probably not really affecting the lighting at all). I have tried bumping the skylight intensity to 15% to get rid of the dark spots. It helped but still didn't look as nice as the translucency. But it rendered in 7 minutes. I will work on the textures for the bark when I get a chance.

I may redo my bark to fix that missing patch and add more detail as Rodney suggested. For now though I have been playing with the foliage, trying to get a bit more randomness. I can't figure out what is causing the really dark areas. They aren't shadows because the top has it and the hairs are set to not cast shadows. Anyone have any idea what it is? I also added a pot. This render took about seven minutes with a sun and 8 skylights. My P4 isn't the fastest though. Ugh! I just noticed my sky doesn't go all the way to the edge!

For texturing the bark I just rotated all of the limbs so they were pointing out to the left or right then scaled the trunk and limbs to 5% in the Z axis in an action. Then I stamped the front half and without moving the decal stamped the back. Somehow I missed a patch and I can't get it to line up right now Attached is my color map converted to jpeg. I also converted this to gray scale and adjusted the contrast and brightness to make my bump map. Is this what you wanted to see Zaryin?

I got my new cd yesterday and have been playing with hair and the UV editor. What do you think of my bonsai tree? C&C and suggestions please.

I just built his nose as a seperate mesh. I attached an image to show the different meshes. The fish is just a bump map by the way.

I think it is a pretty cool idea

Hey again. Yah I agree about the fish swimming too fast Mike. I will worry about that later though. I got side tracked again and started another character. I morphed my turtle into a racoon! Textures still in progress and have yet to model his body but let me know what ya think. I may have to upgrade so I can put some fur on him.

Where is the driver? Or is this an example of why remote controlled fork lifts are a bad idea?

I agree that the one with little roll is better. In my opinion you could maybe back off the roll on it just a bit more though. Also the camera seems to start with a nice smooth accleration and then sort of jump to speed. Maybe you could smooth that out just a bit? Over all it looks pretty nice and professional!

Hey thanks for the compliments on my fish. I hope he doesn't look too Nemoish. But if he does, oh well, he is just a back ground character. I will probably do some variations on his coloring so there are three or four varieties in the pond. Zaryin, where have I been? Well, that could be a really long story depending where I start... Here I just wanted to see if I rigged my fish sufficiently to make him swim. I will probably add an action or pose to make his mouth open and close and be done with him besides the alternate textures. swim.mov

Haha! I watched that at least ten times and laughed every time.

Ok, I know I am tired now because I just tried to scroll my browser by pressing the m key and dragging with the mouse lol. Anyway, thanks DarkLimit. I started on some textures on the fish. If I ever actually make anything from this this fish will just be swimming in the back ground of the koi pond where my turtle lives

It has an inside and the normals are all facing in.