brainmuffin

If I'm not mistaken, though, you can create something with photoshop splines and export it as an .ai file. I'm fairly certain I've done this...

Couldn't you have saved a TON of time just making the image map in Photoshop? I think I could knock that out in like twenty minutes...

You could probably get away with removing one ring from around the eye.

Taking C&C into consideration, I've made some adjustments to the head: And, yes, Phatso, it's just like laying out guidelines before drawing. Only these are 3d guidelines. Just quickly roughing out form with as few splines as possible. The head, hands, chest, waist and feet are all the same deformed sphere, and the arms and legs are the same cylinder. I'm going to do the hands next, and I plan to rough out a proxy in the same fashion when I do. In the past, I've had problems getting hands to look the way I want, and by the time I've got a full, hi-patch hand made, it's too cumbersome to start tweaking.

Thanks! I'll fix that spline in a bit. The body is just a temporary proxy. I'll be modeling a more detailed geometry over top of it.

I'm trying some new techniques with this. My eventual goal is just to finish modeling, rigging, and texturing him. I just want to complete a character, for once. I didn't do any rotoscopes, I'm modeling everything on the fly. I started off with a rough proxy so that I had the proportions I want nailed down before I started: With the head, I did things a little different too. I made the eye and the mouth by lathing splines, and re-shaping them. The nose I started by lathing a nostril, duplicating it, attaching the two, and then modeling the bulb and bridge. I did the eye first, then the nose, and attached them, then the mouth. I'm sorry I didn't take screenshots. Here's the head in its current, almost completed state: And here's an AO render of the head: I'll post my progress here, and hopefully I'll finish him...

This was going to be an entry for the Heroes contest in Jan. but I won't have time to model the ninja turtles before then. This was the first time I've used IBL in A:M, and the first time I've used AO at all.

Have you thought about sprite particles?

In that screen cap you can see Matt's got a bullet object emitting particles, and moving at 65000 cm per second. The particle stream is a line of white dots along the spline he moved the bullet on.

strange. There was a post here last night.

Those clouds were painted in photoshop using a cloud brush that I created.Everything behind the castle is an image painted in photoshop. The moon is a real photo, though. If I can find the time, I'll throw a skydome model together with some tutorials on creating materials for cloudplanes and skies. Sort of a simplified atmosphere generator. In the meantime, today I did some research on castles. Wikipedia has some nice info and pics on Cinderella's castle at Disneyworld, and Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland, as well as the European castles that inspired the Imagineers to design both.

I'm going to try to show some sign of the princess in the tallest spire. I'll figure out how once I get the windows in! or maybe I'll have her out of a balcony. She won't be more than a silhouette, though. Maybe 1/4 of an inch high in the finished piece. I like the bats suggestion, too. There are some stars, but they might need to be brighter or bigger, maybe.

I had modeled a simple tower to test out some tiling textures I made on photoshop. I started playing around with it, duplicating it, scaling it, and sticking them on, and I wound up with a really cool looking castle design. I decided to work it into a poster for my daughter's birthday. (I used to have a sound clip of her saying, "I'm the princess, in the tall, tall tower", hence the title and inspiration). The castle model is only a proxy right now. I'm going to replace it piece by piece with a more detailed model. The lighting and the background are final, for now. The lighting may get tweaked as I go along, and I may repaint the clouds in the BG, I'm not sure. The BG image was done in photoshop, and the final piece will be 11"x14", rendered @ 100ppi.

Kelley, There aren't any modeling booleans in A:M. Only render time booleans. Meaning, boolean operations don't change the geometry, only the render.

Count me in!

its a Vernling infestation! Those are extremely rare!!! Don't step on them, they're a protected species!

I can only guess about the story from the images you've posted, but I don't think it's far fetched to predict that this short is going to win awards. Lots.

ropps started making those again recently.

Ok, pat, first I was going to scold you for upstaging poor LightBeing in his own thread But then I did a double-take. Did I read that right? Are you telling me that there's AO and HDRI in version 12?!!?

Uh, yeah. John, you're gonna have to do a lot better than that.....

"When our branch secretary retired we wrapped her leaving presents in Mylar (we were in a hurry and couldn't find any wrapping paper in time) making the wrapping far more costly than the contents." Actually, Hefty used to make a Mylar wrapping paper in the late 80s... it was like nine bucks a roll...

Rusty has a point. The windsheild wipers wouldn't clear the mud off the entire window like that... and there might be streaks, too, depending on how well the wiper fluid works...

I have to disagree. I think the huge patch count is why you had to abandon it. What you did with the wheels could have been accomplished with alpha and displacement maps, and it wouldn't have taken as loong to model or render...

Charlie's right. The bullet time would be more believable if there were more realtime stuff before and after, but other than that, I like it! do more! a "Killer Bean" style ninja flick is just what we need!!

I think this is a good example of why there isn't more commerce built up in the A:M community. (Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing I'll leave up to you...) Most of the people who are selling models for A:M are selling them on TurboSquid, and selling them at Turbosquid prices. (I personally don't know of anyone who would actually pay $180 for a basketball model!) If you want to sell models, and actually make some money at it, take a look at the Renderosity marketplace, or Daz3d.com. Remember, you are selling to hobbyists, mostly. Remember also, that you only have to spend time making the first one. Any others that you sell cost you nothing in time, only whatever cut TS takes for brokering. Ben, you'll probably be lucky to sell one or two of those at $50 a pop. If you put a dozen realistic weapons like that together (Or even half a dozen) and sold them for $25 a set, you'll make more money in the long run because more people will buy. People have pointed to figures like Victoria and Michael, and say that they wouldn't want to make something like that for A:M because they would want $80 or more for making the model, but DAZ is giving it away for nothing. But DAZ gives them away so that they can sell clothes, and props, and morph targets. (And all the other crap that they sell on there) It's debatable as to whether or not this is a good thing. Personally, I feel that it stunts creativity, for one thing, for another, it detracts from quality. Rather than having everything tied together by one style, one level of detail, you wind up with an eclectic mish-mosh that doesn't really work. And you'll never see anything done stylistically, anything truly original. Try to imagine what Luckbat's or Kricket's work would look like done in poser... eeeeyuuuck! Homoginized...... Try to imagine TWO being done with poser..... Speaking of which, I have to go finish a fight that someone started months ago over at the renderosity A:M forum...