R Reynolds

Personal. (Oh, if I could only get someone to pay me for modeling such things.) Someday, after I finish the other 3/4 of the entire station complex; commercial arcade, waiting room, concourse and train shed, I'd love to do a SteadyCam, tracking shot from street entrance to boarding the train. As tempting as it is to build the entire thing as a one model, there's so much repeated detail that it didn't seem practical. As well I have a philosophical problem with assembling something in the chor; it just doesn't seem "right". So I'm building this room using Action Objects in an action files; 59 objects and counting.

It's a close reproduction of the now demolished Pennsylvania Railroad station in New York. It was built during the same era as the stations you described; a time when the railroads were the engine of the economy and their CEO's were some of the richest men on the continent. They built these huge stations as shrines to their "obviously superior" business skills. Not yet. The perimeter wall divides into eight sections, three of which are almost finished (see attachment). Part of the reason for the close-up was to give me good look at the iconic column tops. They were a major pain. Neither, I tend to never use a new feature for a version or two while the programmer's work the kink's out. I guess you'd call my lighting, old-school overkill. It's all raytraced using an array of 90 kliegs to simulate skylight and bounce light from the surrounding buildings and streets. I tried to use less but the wide vertical columns in the lunette windows kept casting shadows within the room. The sunlight adds another two kliegs and then there's four sun lights to fake bounce light from the floor. All in due time. For now all I can offer is my checkered, 6 ft. reference cylinder.

The sun probably needs more rays cast to further diffuse the shadows from window muntons and I think there should more light coming from the street through the upper entrance but it's getting there.

Nice headlights! I've been watching your impressive progress with the Chevelle and I think it deserves that extra bit of tweaking to get the external sheet metal meeting plant specs. I've circled, in green, the areas where, IMO, two adjoining parts don't match in shape. The roof is circled in red because it appears to me, especially in head on views, that the roof is slightly concave. I'd suggest you grab parts of the central spline, move it up by about 1/8"- 1/4" and tweak the bias of the cross splines accordingly.

I guess action objects are treated differently than when you are manipulating the base model. As you can see in the attached image, the model I brought into the action has both groups with materials and decals but none of that is exposed as a fully expanded instance of an action object. Mike has a work around but it means assembling the model in a chor which doesn't seem as elegant to me. Can you drop poses on action objects?

No. Neither in the chor nor the action. Unless I'm missing something, there's no access to tweaking anything within the imported objects, just their location and orientation.

Excellent start. May I suggest you experiment using Action Objects. I am currently using them to build a large building with a lot of identical but repeating detail and am so far quite happy with the result. It's also how you multiply one light source into a skylight rig. In the case of the the bridge you start with a new action using some base model, say the finished tower. Now you can import a new object into the action; i.e. a copy of the tower but positioned to be the north tower. Next import and position multiple copies of the roadbed to build the bridge. The beauty of this process is that you can build a highly detailed structure and still keep the patch count reasonable. (And with the new displacement feature in v13, you can add 3D rivet heads as repeating decals). You'll run that same play again for the lights; make a new light source then import and position copies inside the action. Once you're in a choreography, you import and position the base model, apply the "construction" action and your bridge is built. So far, the only downside I can see to building structures this way is you'll have to keep the texturing fairly subtle on each model sub-unit because that texturing will repeat as well.

It's an excellent start but I think you're unnecessarily complicating the model by making the frame of the canopy an integral part of the fuselage. Based on this reference image I found on the web, the windscreen frame is a separate, riveted assembly.

Bumps and normal decals are just rendering tricks that (as shown in the attachment) break down at oblique viewing angles. The block really only has a flat face. But considering that the keystone is at the top of an 85 ft. arch it shouldn't be too hard to pick camera angles that maintain the illusion. However as oakchas points out, with the new displacement implementation in v13, the stone may still have a flat face but the figure will actually protrude from it; pretty dang cool. To use it, all I have to do is replace my normal map attribute with a gradient map to get a correctly shaded decal.

Yes, the new displacement implementation is the main reason I'm saving for v13. But don't get too carried away about being able to use any photo. As in bump maps, the greyscaling in your 2d image must be proportional to Z coords. Your average photo isn't even close to this. To get accurate results you'll still need a render of a 3D model with a black to white, Z axis gradient material.

This turned out way better than I had any right to expect. I'm working on a large, beaux arts style, arch that needs a keystone with a classical human figure carved in it. Looking for inspiration on the Web, I came across a free 3D model of a nicely proportioned and posed female figure, unfortunately in 3DS format. After waiting almost 8 hrs. for it to import into A:M (47,000 patches, 8.3 Mb model) I knew that I couldn't add any new splines to the model since finding patches and aligning normals took a LONG time. All I could do was apply aaver's normal map material and render out a rotoscope. Using the rotoscope as a guide, I built surrounding splinage to smoothly blend the figure into a flat surface. Once again I applied the normal map material to the figure's "frame" and screen rendered it along with the rotoscope. I little re-touching in PSPro to hide the seams and I have nice bas-relief for my arch's keystone.

In my opinion you could solve a lot of your corner problems (both those on the bottom of his feet and around his mouth) by defining the corner in each spline with two cp's instead of one. By having a cp at the leading and trailing edge of a rounded corner you have much more control of the shapes on either side of the corner. You might want to read a couple of tutorials. I refer to making rounded corners as filleting; http://www3.sympatico.ca/rodger.reynolds/f...fillet_tute.htm While Yves calls it beveling; http://www.ypoart.com/tutorials/bevels-intro.htm The seam along his eye hood looks like you have the bias peaked. Try selecting the smooth default.

That's a cool instrument panel. I'm curious to see it's wireframe to get an idea of the splinage to decal ratio.

Fabulous!

It's at times like these that I need to go back to basic principles and do a quick and simple experiment to learn what's happening. I suggest the following; - start a fresh project with a new model and a copy of your decal - the new model is a simple cylinder with its long axis vertical lying along the Y axis - due to the model's location and orientation, cylindrically mapping the decal on it should be straightforward - now using the numeric inputs, move the model a known amount in X or Z to see what happens to the decal - using numeric inputs, rotate the model around the X and Z axis to see what happens to the decal - now move and rotate the decal the same increments and see if you can re-align the decal Once you've taught yourself the proper technique, write a quick tutorial text document while it's fresh in your mind and store it in your AM_mini_tutes folder

After you've applied the material to the desired group you can translate and rotate that particular instance of the material. Pick the group, note its pivot coordinates and then translate that group's material to the same coords and rotate it as required.

"Now you can set it as either a bump or displacement map." With the new displacement, I question the need for bump or normal maps. Would someone please do a comparison to gage the render hit?

Excellent work. Are you using bump maps for the front tire treads?

My apologies as I was unaware of your task. Motivating potential TWO contributors with a free copy of A:M is perfectly understandable.

Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive or don't sufficiently understand what this restriction implies but wouldn't this be the first step down a path that would turn those happy few you get satisfaction from using A:M for projects other than character animation into second class citizens of the community?

I agree with Michael that I could use a few more views from different angles to get a handle on the shapes you are trying to model. But my feeling is that you're getting caught up in keeping a low patch count and are asking for way, WAY too much deformation of the patches; especially the five pointers (which can be challenging at the best of times). I use bias tweaks for just that, minor shape adjustments; they're not sledge hammers. I think you're going to have to rethink the splinage in the areas I've circled in blue. Draw at least another spline ring around your opening (you may need more than that depending upon your personal tolerance to creasing) and reduce the area of your patches through the convoluted surfaces. Having said that I don't know the construction of the B-36 at all but I wouldn't be surprised if this fuselage dimple is something that is a separate assembly riveted to an otherwise cylindrical fuselage. If that's the case, by building it like the real prototype you could avoid the whole problem and achieve more realism in the bargain.

No need for apologies. If I didn't want suggestions, I wouldn't have posted. The bottle group has two materials; the first for the optical properties and the second (shown below at 100%) is applied as a bump material to add texture. It only looks cloudy from this camera angle. As you can see in the entire sky decal below, it's a partly cloudy day and the sun is unobscured. It's always a mild and sunny day in my CG world.

Original image at thread start has been updated with the bottle cap revised to reflect the various suggestions. Thanks for the input.

The back story is the drinker bought the bottle out of the vending machine just before leaving for the work site and stored it in his tool box. So the top probably didn't have that much time to get blemished but I will probably tilt it's colour closer to a cream. The attached image was my prototype.

After some tweaking; how 'bout this?