Gene

Nice work! Did they give you the reference material? What kind of layout are these maps...somethings look like you've used bump maps and some appear to be separate models? Cheers, Eugene

John, The Green Canary is hilarious! I don't know where you get your material from, but you've got one heck of an imagination. I've attached another example, this time the tree was not animated at all...the only things which are moving are the animated decals...so, the movement is quite subtle. Best to save and loop in Quicktime. The Project file isn't really setup for the tree to be viewed at all angles, but perhaps I could work one up and make it available. Thank you for all the comments. Eugene TreeSwaying_003.mov

This was animated as in an Action so it could be repeated easily.

Hi All, I tried the technique to build a tree as used by Brian Taylor who is working on Rustboy (www.rustboy.com). I think the results were quite good and this is a much faster technique when compared to using hair (or at leas that is my experience). Here is a quick summary of what I did. 1. Create a patch and past a Cookie Cut decal of leaves. 2. Animate the patch (by tweaking splines and cp's) to give a wrustling movement to the leaves. 3. Render as a QT with an alpha channel (do not use any compression for the QT, just use Animation). 4. Make a model of a tree trunk 5. Make a patch and add a decal of the animated QT as a Cookie Cutter. 6. Copy and paste several of the "leaves" patches and arrange to look like a tree. 7. Animate the tree/patches of leaves so that it appears the branches are swaying in the wind. 8. Render in a Chor. My example is attached....thanks to Johnl3D for his advice and examples. Cheers, Eugene TreeSwaying_004.mov

I tried to extrude along a path and although the path is OK, you can't scale along the way... I guess I'll keep doing it the old fashioned way. Cheers, E

Hi All, Could anyone tell me if they have a good method of modeling a snail shell? I tried to use the extrude plugin, but you can't control the "tightness" of the spiral. Any ideas or examples? Thanks in advance. Eugene