JTalbotski

The head seems too narrow to me at first glance. Jim

Nice! Very realistic. Is that using the new blurred reflection? Jim (edit: Well, of course if I read Yves comment, I would have known.)

That is FUNKY! It's got a nice style to it. Nice render, too. But my neck feels sore already, just thinking about how the driver has to sit in order to see out the windshield. Are there going to be characters invovled in this project? Are they going to be realistic characters or stylized? It would be interesting to see who was going to drive that machine. Keep us updated, Jim

It sounds like a bad hook. Sometimes if you can locate the bad hook, you can delete it and try to hook it somewhere else, or hook it just one spline past where you had hooked it, to get rid of the problem. Jim

WOW!!! That's the best looking cg hair I've seen, maybe ever! Do you mind sharing your hair settings for color, specular and such? Is there more than one emitter in the hair system? Give me the details, please! Jim

I love the characters! But, isn't that extortion? Where are the feds when you need them! Very cute animation. Jim

Nice! It looks like a very good start for a first head model! Keep going and if you have any 3/4 views that will give us a better idea of how it looks. Jim

Hey cool, Rodney! The little animation really shows where you are headed with it. I like the robot styling. I am wondering about the Hercules-type character, though. How does he fit in with the robots? Jim

Thanks for the link...beautiful stuff! That guy knew how to light his models! I love the dark solid shadows he created, gives an almost graphic look to the images. You look where he wanted you to look. Jim

No, I won't be giving up Photoshop. I have become less of a purist about renders than I had been. Why beat yourself over the head trying to do something difficult in A:M, that would take 10 seconds in your image editor? Now if I had to animate the smoke, I would consider using particles, but I would probably render out the particles separately and use the render as a decal on a flat patch. Or video tape a real stream of smoke lit against a black backdrop and decal that on a flat patch. Jim

Okay, I see. I intended for him to have very thin lips. I think my decal has the lip texture going too far down his face towards his chin. I think I will adjust the decal. That will be easier than stitching in more detail and reapplying the decal. Thanks, Jim

natess44- You're right about the fingers being too thick. I haven't smartskinned them yet, and I think they are swollen because the spline rings are bending and deforming badly. I know I didn't model them that thick! Parlo- Can you explain about the harshness of the lower lip? Do you mean like "non-friendly"? The lump on his shoulder is the start of modeling some cloth folds into his suit. Doesn't read very well yet. bakerrod_ Thanks! I should have stated that the smoke was added in Photoshop. Jim

Thanks folks! Here's the latest render of Sir Nigel. I've added the bump map as a diffuse map @20% to help show the wrinkles a bit more. And I started assigning the mesh to bones. And I textured the hands, too. FYI, his fingernails are just decals: color, bump, and specular. They look much better than I expected. bakerrod- I agree about the top hair not matching the shorter back hair. It is too long, but also it doesn't render as smoothly as the other hair. I bet my widow's peak beats yours! psylancestudios- To be completely honest, the only times A:M crashed while working on this model was when I was using the OSX alpha. I wanted to see how far the alpha would let me go with a model. I found out when it would crash anytime I tried to render hair. It also crashed randomly here and there when trying to render without hair. But since I brought it over to the OS9 version of A:M, it hasn't crashed once while working on this character. Tally-ho! Jim

Thanks Stephen, but I can't take that much credit. You gave him so much humor, life and believability. You made him think and react. It was a real thrill for me to have one of my characters brought to life that way. Ditto the comments about excess drinking. Cheers (with a grande' vanilla cappuccino)! Jim

Mike, The mom looks wonderful. I love the lighting you gave her. It kind of tells a story already. Jim

Impressive! Even more impressive for 4 hours work. Jim

Ditto! Jim

Personally, I feel it would be time to do the ol' copy-flip-attach thing, so you can really get an understanding of the character's form. I would like to see the belly smoothly blend into the sides more. There's kind of a wavy thing happening right now. Jim

ROTFLOL!! I'll get you, Bud! Actually, I may look like that eventually. I got the hairline and most of the wrinkles already! Jim

Next step! Specularity maps. And a touch more hair on top. And a spiffy new name. Sir Nigel. Jim

Well, I was wrong in remembering. It took about 10 minutes for the 9 pass render. It took 6 minutes for the 5 pass render. ------------ Thanks, Yves! Jim

Nice textures! Show us more! Jim

Wow, that is pretty nice! Are those mocap actions you had done or something you found on the web? Looks like it works really well. Jim

Thanks! Jim

I tried to use them a couple times, but kept running into an "out of memory" message, even though I have 1.5 GB of ram. (Mac G4 Dual Gig Processor) I haven't tried running it on a previously rendered image as was posted by Randy (I think) in another thread. I should give it a go. Thanks, Jim