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Awesome!.. 3 cheers. can't wait to see it textured.

Very Cool John, I can actually use that technique on the project I'm working on right now. How did you do the noise in the sphere?

Um yes there are. But they aren't permanent like other apps. Try out material effectors. and there might be another way to do a boolean but It escapes me right now. Man I'm getting old.

more to the point. AM does do Hardware acceleration of realtime renders, just like maya and 3d games and everything else. So your card will work most likely with AM, you may have driver issues.. I've never had any, but I've seen threads where a user says they have problem untill some driver gets installed. Like I said before.. you have to change or "unlearn" some preconcieved notions you might have from working in a "Polygon" based app. Splines require less Mesh control points to create a surface that appears to be infinately smooth.. more similar to nurbs than poly's in that respect, but much easier to model with. A model done in Polygons would need to have a mesh 15 to 20 times more dense to equal the smoothness of an AM model.. especially if you will be zooming in close on the model. So in some ways AM splines are the best low patch/poly option you'll ever find. But they are nothing like Polygons except that they can be square or triangular. Preferably square (another opposite to polygons which lean toward triangulation for optimal use). I'm wondering why you seem so concerned in purchasing a $300 application when you have laid out $7,000.00 for one which you seem to not want to use. Seems like a no brainer to me with the information you've given and recieved in this thread I'll lay off the input at this point. I'd only be repeating myself.

Maya Unlimited can do certain things programatically with dynamics that are nice. Per particle control comes in handy. Fluids is nice. Other than that.. AM does it all and beats it hands down. Maya wishes it was in AM's ballpark when it comes to animation and constraints. I wish it was in AM's ballpark, because then it wouldn't be so painful when I have to downgrade to Maya. And I can tell you another thing. Maya crashes on every machine I run it on about 4 or 5 times a day. Even AM alphas give me less trouble. Like Rodney said. use the two together and composite.. don't try and take objects back and forth unless its poly's from Maya to AM. You can convert Splines to Polys and AM's modeler is definately funner and easier than trying to model organic stuff in Maya (mechanically its a toss up). Everyone has their preferences, but every person I've introduced AM to that actually bothered to give it a try stuck with it and liked it much better than Maya. There will be a learning curve, because AM does things the right way and Maya does them the complicated way. In some respects you'll have to unlearn what you assume with Maya, in order to clearly grasp AM, but when you do? Welcome to Nirvana :-) ohhhhmmmmm....

I use both.. one for work, because the other idiots at work insist on using it and one at home and sometimes at work because I love to use it. Guess which one I love to use ;-) That said with 14 years of experience in 3d modelling and animation and 10 years of AM and 7 or Maya. Easy to use, fun to use, fantastic to use, I could go on and on.

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lol.. yeah you could sell it on 2nd life and make a killing... in linden bucks ;-)

fanboy says "Rock On"!

try setting the initial velocity to 0 or something near that. That should let them stay close to the hand and fall from it.

AMAZING! Great lighting to. Color me more impressed than I have been in a looong time! Great work.

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That is an excellent Idea... I do it all the time. Its how my demon went from blah to hulk in about 10 minutes ;-) I like Couston's style to. I always like the "Michelangelo" large forarm hand style. Its especially appropriate for Wolverine since he's a bit of a thug anyway. I can't wait to see the experiments. And for the record.. I agree with the boots. They look fine to me to. I'm not sure what Mage is getting at either.

Looking good Lee. the head looks even better, and I think its perfect now. I took the liberty of hiliting some points on the pic you posted. Mostly "opinion" stuff, so if you think it rings true change it.. if not stick to what you know. the right side is modified in photoshop.. the left side stays the same. [attachmentid=23029]

Nah.. don't give up on it Lee.. it'll turn out in the end... Its already excellent.. I'm just trying to help you make it perfect ;-) keep it up.. it'll work out.. you'll probably end up resplining half of him 3 years from now and making him even better. I do it all the time. What do you plan on doing with him.. Animation or stills? if its just stills rigging him in the short term doesn't half to be a huge nightmare.. you can just rig him enough to get a pose and clean up the mesh for the still. If its animation, you'll need more "rig" so you don't half to do a ton of cleanup on each frame. If you just rig him for still shots, you can always come back later and rig him for animation. Think of it as an iterative process. I think everyone wants to see you finish this guy. Don't think all the comments are tearing him apart. Its all opinion as well. I'll post wips sometimes and get tons of comments, half will be subjective. Some I'll use.. some I won't. keep at it.. its all good. C

the way I said will allow any object on the plane. It should be accessible to anyone using any version of AM. C

Hey Mage.. try this.. it'll get it perfect and he'll never know. See if you can get a hirez shot of just the background grid. Then use that as your camera rotoscope (ie. backdrop. Then set up a plane as a reciever for the front projection and voila.. you'll get shadows and the background grid will be perfect. C

ok.. its to a point now where I can comment. Looks good, but I agree with some of the comments about anatomy.. Number one.. his legs are to fat at the knees. Taper them into the knee more and you're right in your drawing.. carry the muscles down around the knee.. don't end them above it. Same with the elbows.. very important to bring the muscles from the forarm up and around the elbow joint. His shins are to short.. add about two or three inches to his height by elongating his shins. As muscular as you have him.. I'd beef up the shoulder joints alot as well. they actually taper in like a skinnier arm would, when they should be thicker than the bicep. I'm really digging the costume. I'd just work on the anatomy. Here's some links to stuff I've posted for reference before.. I think I may have even done parts for downloads. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=A...st&id=15498 http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...20167&st=45 http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=9642&st=0 an arm model http://www.colins-loft.net/free/parts/Arm.mdl a torso model http://www.colins-loft.net/free/parts/trunk.mdl here's an example of what I'm saying about the elbows and knees... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=A...st&id=14424 Keep it up.. its looking awesome. C

Dude post it... I may have to do a flash game out of that! Awesome penguins by the way.

Vern.. are you seeing this Vern.. we have a convert. the Cult lives!!! Good one Nancy!

Awesome! I had a feeling, knowing your predisposition for "realism" that this might be the case. Now I need to test and figure these things out. Thanks for the lesson Yves.

Jim.. what you are talking about is the surface roughness, i.e brushed metal versus a chrome steel bearing. William is right.. you can mimic that with a texture bump or material. Not all metals have it, or would appear to have it to the naked eye, And it wouldn't be obvious from the camera distance in many thanks to antialiasing. I've been looking at metals all day now and I've noticed one thing related to this that AM doesn't seem to simulate. When the surface is rough and reflections are soft. They are more focused up close and get blurrier and fade more with distance. The fading we can do but the blurring isn't there yet. its a fine point of course, but might add to the realism on TM. Maybe you could have a near and far reflection filter with each having a different blurriness? This brings up another question. Does DOF only apply to the camera? ie.. are reflections of far off objects blurred as well? I know something like this could blow the render times through the roof, but I thought after Yves educational post that we could start getting into specifics.

Wow.. thanks Yves.. you've given me a good education. Part of my problem was coming at it from other 3d apps which break some functions out to multiple settings. I see now that AM has it all there, its just a more fine tuned dance between fewer attributes. I'll see if I can apply this to SS and Tinman to get the effects I want. Thanks again. Oh and you are right about the ankle... it bugged me to.. I actually lengthened his legs in the model and forgot to lengthen the shin bones ;-)

So I got inspired by another thread and dinked for about an hour to put this together. [attachmentid=21884] It brings up something we've discussed in other threads for Tin Woodman, reflection and how to make it better in darkly lit situations. Yves is working on solutions (I think) but I wanted to get input on things that might improve reflection in AM and get input on this guy as well ;-) The thing I find I miss most is a reflective color. Is there a way to do this and I'm just missing it? One thing that kills metals is when they reflect to much color from the environment if they have color themselves, like gold or brass or copper. The other thing is how to fake a brighter more reflective surface while keeping the reflection high. If you crank it up and the environment is dark you end up with a dark character (realistic sure but not good for cinematography). being able to add a diffuse element to the shading while still keeping the reflection high could fake this. I don't know how you'd do it and it could really be used in wrong ways, but theres got to be some way to pump up the metals brightness without blowing out your background with lights and bright colors. Any ideas?

or you could just set up a smartskin or relationship that positions bone A where you want based on bone B ;-) You'd just have to make it work for as much rotation as you want from bone B. No math required, although I Love math. You may want to only move bone A 179 degrees for 90 degrees of B so it always takes the right path to the solution.. otherwise it might move backwards to bone B, which could be another neat trick I suppose.