Ross Smith

Wow... I mean, dang. Phenomenal texturing. Please give us an idea how you did that. Did you photograph someone's face? Or do you have jedi-level Photoshop skills? Seriously, tell us. Now.

Arrgh... I'm having a helluva time trying to rig the shoulder on this dude. I have the tail rigged just perfect (thanks, ARM!), but the shoulder has me stumped... Maybe I just made it wrong. I don't know when to use fan bones and when to use smart skin. Advice, anyone? Links to good tuts, perhaps? I couldn't find much for this on the ARM. Thanks.

Jim, please clue us in about that bump map. Did you draw a sketch and scan it? Or, Wacom tablet? Did you use vector paths? How a person makes the bump map for a wrinkly face really intrigues me. Maybe because it seems to deal so much with the geometry as well as the surface.

An asymmetrical walk would go well with his asymmetrical form. Good going on 'im -- you captured something creepy, and I don't just mean that head in the glass bubble! S'a good question, though. Does the scientist sit inside, or is that head some grafted piece of ex-lab-assistant?

Heya folks. I'm still hackin' away at this fellow. After getting real frustrated with texturemaps, I turned to rigging. I really enjoy rigging, it seems. I wish I had a presentable texture-mapping job for you, but I'm not even that far yet... Would anyone have some good advice regarding displacement maps? I think I want to use one for the near-skeletal ribs on my dude.

*wishes he knew what a cookie-cut map was* The big-pores look you're going for is called rosacea, I believe.

Just rolling with it? Tobacco? ... Okay, maybe I'm the only one that caught that one. But anyway, wow. I mean, um, wow. I really like him. I agree about that touch of Vincent Price, but it strikes me as absolutely appropriate. Could you treat us to a wireframe?

Well, that answers -my- question.

I remember that kid! You were posting him earlier this year, in the autumn, methinks. I'm really looking forward to the completed animation. That creature's expressions! Really good stuff.

Awesome! I really like the style. His face resembles a voodoo mask of some sort. What's the rest of his body look like? Can we see?

Y'know, this looks pretty cool... but does it happen any time other than Wednesdays? :\ That's me busy day.

Your friend is looking a little australopithecine with that second image there, I agree. I personally think extrusion is the way to go, though. If you feel that you should restart, don't be afraid to. I began, tweaked, and discarded some twenty original attempts to make a particular head I had drawn until I had something I could really work with, and that I kept. The best part is, seriously, you learn so much by doing this. You get an immediate chance to make a new model and avoid some small mistake you found last time. There are some great tuts on the web, check out www.lowrestv.com/arm , I think is the link... it's very helpful. Good luck!

Javier, that is a very interesting recommendation. To answer your question, that is not the color that I model or texture with. I have the default "Hash blue" in the modeling window, and I typically render in the choreography on black. This time I decided to use the gray background to help this rather dark texture stand out. Anyway, thankee for the input and support.

Crazy, man. You must've been doing this for years. Do you have a gallery of some kind? I'm getting really attached to this guy, he's got so much imagination in him. Although I can't tell if his face will be leathery or just straight-out cloth.

Hahah... joke's on me. I just saw the subtitle. "Quick! Edit your post! -- Too late? Curses." Still tho, it's great. What are your plans for this funkarrific little dude?

Not that kind of laying! Besides, a scanner would be rather awkward for that. Why not just use a camera? You're pulling my leg, right? You haven't actually scanned ox hearts and slabs of meat -- have you? If you have, though, more power to ya... True that it would be easier to get the natural effect by scanning real life. I guess I'm trying to get a handle for how textures work generally, too. Whoops! It's tesselation, not tessolation. My bad. Pat, a tesselation (my fast and loose definition) is any geometric shape that can be laid in a grid, or like tiles, with no space between the shapes. Hexagons and squares tesselate, for example, but octagons do not. You may have heard of M. C. Escher, an artist famous for his tesselations. He's one of my favorites, actually. He was really on the ball with the "math and beauty" idea. Anyway, here's a little divX post. It just shows the scales in motion. More input is most welcome. Li'l divX post!

Looking good, Hutch! His feet look a bit big to me -- but I didn't watch the cartoon very much, so don't listen to me for that sort of judgement call. Your idea for the wings sounds good to me. I used a differen process with the same result -- I laid out the "bones" (fingers in my case), and then systematically broke the circumferential splines and attached them to each other, ending up with a cross-section of the whole hand as one big spline. Are these the new wings on Goliath in this update here?

Holy Toledo! That's incredibly good. You're a sculptor, right? Or a painter? 'Cos I'm not buying that first model story for a minute. I like the really imaginative design. Please, keep us updated!

Down with earning a living! And school! I mean... dangit. Looking forward to more, then, when it comes.

Impressive modeling! Very nice job with that. Her garment is a little visually confusing, though. It looks like the surface of steel, but appears to bend and move like cloth. Is this part of her character? If you're going for more metallic armor, I would make its curves "firmer", or if you're going for more of a robe, maybe change the surface properties. That's my only crit, though. Keep going! By the way, I know how it feels to 3D in school's shadow. Just hang in there, and you'll find the time to keep working somehow. (My model is taking me months, but he's getting there, a few hours a week at a time.)

I very muchly like the way you frame the shots. The transition and the focus shift are both great. It gives a real cinematic panache that triples my impression of its quality. I concur about the monster's motion. My other thought was, Katrina doesn't seem to move much at all for the first half-second or so. Granted, she's trying to stay still, but perhaps curl the edges of her fingers with slight tension, or shift her body slightly with the drawing of a held breath. Do something like that, and I think the effect will be really dazzling.

Hehehe! *imagines laying a fish on a scanner* I know that's not what you meant, John, but the funny image came anyway. Proof that your vote counts! Zaryin, since I'm using a decal, I took you up on the idea of an alpha layer. It's sort of a messy trick, what I'm doing, but it works perfectly. After I apply the tessolation to the whole set of "Tail" patches, I take the loop of uppermost patches. I flatten them for a UV stamp, and with some photoshop-made masks based on those stamps, the scales appear to "give way" to another texture (yellow, at present -- later, it will be skin). The pics should clarify. Anyway, thanks for the input, it helped me remove an obstacle. John, I Googled some fish scales and remade my tessolation based on a good photo of a fish I found. It isn't an actual stamp from the fish, but I think it looks a whole darn lot more fish-like, at least. And Noel, I figure you're right -- so I flipped the direction of the scales. Here's the current output: New scales, 1 New scales, 2 The odd "yellow scales" at the top will be fixed. That's just an artifact of masking out only the color channel. I used bump, diffuse, spec intensity, and spec size as well. Bump is actually controlled by a different graphic, the same tessolation but with much stronger gradients, in B/W, than are provided by the color one. Seems to make all the difference. What do folks think? Are these scales keep-able? Thanks again for reading! --Ross

That's nice, man! Better than any car I've ever tried to make. Can we see a wireframe?

That's an excellent idea. I'm decaling, so that should work fine. Thank you, Z!

Ooh! I like the pose. The eyelid adds a lot, too -- his body language is communicating some noble struggle. Or maybe I'm just too deep in analyzing this book for class... Either way, me likey. I don't want to dis your originality or anything, but when I looked at him, I saw a resemblance to Thom. Maybe give his feet a little more definition? Looking forward to progress!