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Sounds fun! I'm better in the early day.. still wear out by 4 or 5. Where are you located David? It might be a good option for some of the Chattanooga people, and I'm willing to drive halfway, especially in the fall. pick a date. C

Try this tutorial out.. http://www.colins-loft.net/new_coop_tutorial/CoopEye.html and if you want to tear something a little more robust apart.. here's an "uber" eye (ie.. it can change its look by sliding pose sliders" http://www.colins-loft.net/free/UberEyes.zip and here's a pic of what can be done with it... C

try this one out.. and if you have any questions.. drop ask here or drop me a note. http://www.colins-loft.net/new_coop_tutorial/tutorials.html C

Finally! getting around to rigging him.. Still very rough and lots of tweaking.. but I couldn't resist setting up a pose. Actually glad I did.. It brings up some areas to fix on the model and texturing. [attachmentid=15498] C

Hey Stuart, don't sweat it.. I welcome all critics... and yes fixing those manicured hooves is on my todo list.. when he's done.. he'll be craggy and nasty ;-) I actually did groom the hair.. which made it messier ;-) and something about the version 12 and up hair is different. It seems that the kink has changed.. and become more spiral or something.. it looks more like curly or kinky hair than frizzy hair. I did some test renders between 11, 12, and 13 and theres definately a difference after 12. I also took the density down by 75 percent and increased the thickness.. which causes some issues in the chest, but nothing thats not fixable. His render time got cut by an hour and 10 minutes doing this and the result seems nicer for the most part. He renders in 50 minutes at 1600x1200 and 16 passes now (normal render.. not AO) C

It took about 2 hours at 1600x1200 with 16 passes and the AO sampling set to 30. ( I'm running a 2Ghz AMD with 2 gigs of ram) I also did a simple color pass with an interesting result. and It only took 5 minutes at 1600x1200 16 passes.... Here it is.. (might be an option for really fast hair rendering in a seperate pass or something.. but it looked pretty cool for 5 minutes, take a look... [attachmentid=15428] C

Thanks for the programs guys.. They'll come in real handy!!! and heres some More Ambient Occlusion (and some Compositing) goodness!.. Man you've got to love that hair in GI. [attachmentid=15419] [attachmentid=15420] C and a wire for the spline nuts.... [attachmentid=15421] If it were'nt for all the cool new features in 13.. I'd be done rigging and texturing this guy by now. C

Its just a little tricky, but here goes. First... Turn off all of your lights in the choreography. If you have any ambience turned up on groups in your model.. you'll want to turn that down to (or maybe not ;-). Turn off the video safe area on your camera and set the camera background to black. Then Select the model you want to render in the Chor (for some reason I can't get a wireframe to render if I don't have the model selected). With the model selected, render the image out with shaded wireframe turned on and Multipass set to 16. Thats it. You'll get an all black image with a white wireframe. Then I just composite that in photoshop. Its in version 13. Again its a little tricky.. Yves has an excellent tutorial on the subject, but I do a few things different. The first thing I do is create a group of the whole model and set all of its surface properties to the default. That keeps my colored groups from showing up and its an easy way to turn stuff off. If you want your colors back.. just move the all group to the top of the group list and the colors will come back (or delete it, but why do that when you might want it back later). Then in the Chor settings you can turn on all the settings you'll need for global ambience, per Yves tutorial. I don't use the Ambient shader in the render settings, since my group colors are set already and I find the ambient shader harder to control. Bingo ;-) You caught me. Its an excellent way to create lighting variation on the model, but a little hard to control. I find the overall GI without occluders is too light and even. This way you get nice shadows. I discovered it playing around with turning the floor's casting occlusion on and off. This image (which is actually cropped) was rendered out at 3200x2400 and took 2 hours or so to render at 16 passes and the ambient sampling up at 30. I also set the Ambient Occlusion amount in the Chor settings up to 150 which caused and interesting linear striation on the model (I kinda liked it, but I can see where others might not) NeatImage could easily take out the noise, but I liked it. Its a setting on the Nvidia drivers. I have one giant desktop that is 2560x1024. Then I just set my desktop to an image that size. C

No problem guys.. feel free ;-) It brings up a notion.. we should have a desktop design contest or at least have a Cool AM desktop thread... Hmmmm I'll have to start that. C

My new (in my face dual monitor desktops ). [attachmentid=15340] C And my favorite... By the way does anyone know a good program to make your desktop into a slideshow for the PC or even animate it? [attachmentid=15341]

I couldnt play the video.. didnt have the codec and said the quicktime server didnt either ??? but to answer your question about the Ambient Occlusion. Yes I've seen it in almost every render I've done with it. I'm not sure what causes it either.. seems to be related to hooks maybe ? C

Couple more changes and starting to work on the rigging. rigging thread changed the eyes to have a glowing iris. Fixed the brow line, and added a fetlock joint to the legs. [attachmentid=15294] C

Hey Sharky, Yep I used photoshop.. not my direction painter. I just flattened the model in a pose and screengrabbed the image to paint over. I'll have to get back to you on that naked demon desktop ;-) C

fixed the hair on the legs to not show through to the skin. [attachmentid=15138] Sharky.. its pretty easy.. heres a tutorial I wrote a while back on the subject. http://www.colins-loft.net/hairbrush.html I may look into that, but since the leg is so covered with hair.. not sure if its needed. Thanks for the input though. C

a wireframe... [attachmentid=15116] C

Heres is the spin.. you can finally see him from all sides. http://www.colins-loft.net/free/examples/D.../demonSpin.html Thanks for the input.. I'll work on getting a wireframe up later. C

Dammit I'm gonna find that camera you're spying on me with ;-) Yep thats exactly what I'm gonna do.. and i'm gonna try some tricks to fake the hair shadows and such. Stuff taks way to long to render with shadows (animation wise... not to bad for an image though) .. yeah I have that as well.. but I have the an aditional Cornea group (ie.. contact) that is opaque.. just to make the eyes pop for now. I'm still thinking about what the face will look like in the end. I do that as well. but in this case its trickier since I'm using hair density and length maps. Having a fat base in sparse hair would look odd. So I'm gonna fix that with a fake fur texture under the places where the hair should be thick. (ie.. what Mike said above.) Whats your guys stand on Demons and nipples?.. I mean are they born and do they breast feed? I had nipples on the maps.. and then I got way to caught up in that philosophical question.. so I took them off to get my mind off the subject.. bluck. C

Finally some more progress. Added teeth and inner mouth. His teeth are based on a gorillas, specifically King Kong's ;-) I can't wait to throw the new face rig on him. Tweaked some stuff here and there and Added a torso down hair map. Oh and he's pretty much done as far as modelling goes except maybe for more bling. Now to completely texture and rig. [attachmentid=15064] C

Hey Chris, Welcome to the funnest software in the world ;-) I noticed you are in Georgia. We have a local AM user group that meets once in a blue moon. Feel free to stop in at a meeting. We usually have Will Sutton and myself (usually? we've never missed one ;-) and a bunch of other AM users from the southeast. welcome, and if you ever have questions.. feel free to ask. C

looks to me like it might actually be your shadows.. its obvious you are using zbuffer shadows and they are soft.. that might make the edges in shadow look soft if the color is close enough to the shadow color. the bottom isnt in shadow so it might be sharper? I'm not really seeing what you are, but I'm guessing that might be it. You might try turning on ratraced shadows with 4 rays per light or something like that and see if that helps. C

Hi I'm Colin, and I'm an AM Junkie.

Don't be fooled by this poser guys.. He's paid talent to do all this work. Seriously though.. if you guys saw what he knew 2 months ago versus what he's doing now.. You're jaws would be on the floor. I just keep telling him.. I'm always right. ALWAYS! C

Human Skin tshirt? hmmm... I like that, I may have to work on that next ;-P I'm hoping to get him textured before I leave the country on friday. If not.. I'll have two weeks to think about it. Dhar, Its a thought. I actually want to have this demon and him duke it out in a parking lot or something when I'm done. But I have to finish the demon first since he's a being created for someone else and I'm about one million years overdo with getting him finished. Now that I've gotten a good head of steam.. there's no stopping. C

I agree.. he actually has that, but its not showing up in this bump. I'm going to go back and redo the horn UVs and map so I can texture it better. I rushed this one just to see it in black. How bout the skin? any comments? C

good call again lucbat.. I fixed the fingers around the nails, mine where two square and pulled the ridge around the nail down. Will, yep I'm planning on either adding a bulge spline ridge around the arm band, or using the new displacement to create that.. not sure yet. Mike, He has a human arse.. you just havnt seen it yet. I'm leaving the proportions of the waist as they are for now, Its an easy thing to thicken up later. In fact his entire body is from my hero.. and I thickened him up using the distortion mesh in about 5 minutes. I've also used distortion cages to flatten his torso in poses for decaling. The distortion box is my friend! and I think its the most underated AM feature which is saying allot. Oh yeah.. brainmuffin. His cheek is a horn (intentionally for now). I had it in my original sketch of his face.. It's just one point pulled out on the cheek right now. I'm playing around with the notion of loosing it or fleshing it out more. I'm torn about which way to go right now with his mouth (wich will probably influence his cheek). I'm going to either leave his lips and add teeth or give him a maw with external teeth and no lips (more skull or aligator like. Opinions? I've also thickened up the nose a bit and started adding textures. What do you guys think of the textures right now? I'm still experimenting with skin looks. [attachmentid=14464]