Godfrey

Actually, if you're going for realism, the bright sun would wash the stars right out; check out some authentic NASA shuttle pics -- no stars! (Of course, the tinfoil-hat-wearers would have you believe that it's because all those photos are faked, and NASA just forgot to Photoshop stars into all those pictures.) (It's ironic, but Hollywood's unrealistic treatment of outer space actually looks more real than reality...) Comparing your image to the NASA pics, I'd suggest making the planet a brighter blue, especially the arc nearest the sun -- maybe even fading the rest down to blackness. Nice job on the Shuttle, BTW.

Uh... The Empire Strikes Back?

Very nicely done! I especially like the grunge. Do his little control arms pop out?

Weird... when I click on the link, it takes me to the image I intended to link to. I've edited the link to point directly to the image, rather than its gallery page.

Well, I might could do, but it's from a story I was writing set in the far future (the ship itself is several hundred years into its journey), so any support spacecraft on board probably wouldn't give the viewer a good feeling for how big it was (unless shuttles look the same in the future as they do today). At any rate, here it is with a Saturn V rocket sitting on one of the clamps for the (not yet modeled) supply section (which sits between the engines and the habitat section): Laser? Unfortunately, because of the way the model is designed, it doesn't really lend itself well to perspective: Since the forward asteroid shield overhangs the rest of the engine section, it doesn't look much smaller when viewed from behind the ship -- and when viewed from the front, the shield obscures the rest of the section! Mr. MM? Is that you? Just a touch. But I like the way you think...

Try as I might, I couldn't find a way to convey the scale of the model from one of my image contest entries. I tried several different camera angles, but none of them really said "this thing is freaking huge". Any suggestions? (For reference, here's a streaming QuickTime movie which shows how big it is relative to a human-sized object.)

Actually, that wall could be done with five boxes: two long ones on the top and bottom, which reach to the bottoms and tops of the windows, respectively, and then three more boxes to the left of, between and to the right of the windows.

If you're trying to get a more impressive glow, leave the ambiance intensity at 100% and bump up the Glow Intensity (and possibly the Glow Radius) in the choreography's properties.

Great soundtrack! (The modeling/animation's nice too. But an original soundtrack like that is rare on these forums!)

Well, the obvious answer would be "don't set your ambience above 100%". That said, what version of A:M are you using, and what are you using to provide the ambient color? (a material, surface properties on the model, etc.)

Do you have a light source attached to the torch? (If so, if it's in the flames, make sure the flames themselves aren't casting shadows.)

Part of it, I'm guessing, is the depth of field. The janitor bot is in sharp focus, but the little bot in the background, which looks like it's very near the janitor, is very out of focus -- as are the foreground rocks. This makes it look like a very narrow depth of field, which is the effect you see when you take a picture of a small model from very close to it. Try widening up your DoF so that the background spaceship is only slightly blurry, and see if that makes a difference. You could also try moving the camera about halfway down towards the ground, so the janitor looms, and perhaps scaling the distant little bot down a bit so it looks as far away as it is (the narrow viewing angle disguises the distance quite a bit; the closer you zoom, the less an object's apparent size changes with distance).

Óđinn (Odin, Oden, Wodin, Wotan...) plucked out his eye and cast it into Mímr's well in exchange for wisdom, so MixePix's sewed-up empty socket is quite fitting.

Actually, I suspect the ultimate purpose of these contests is for Hash to have spectacular images and animations which show off the capabilities of their product. In which case, if getting help on an entry or collaborating with others changes a viewer's response from "that's pretty good" to "holy cow, I've gotta buy this software", I'm betting Hash wouldn't mind at all.

I'll generally set them up in an on/off pose (which I set to default to ON). That way, when you drop your model into an action or a choreography, the fan bones are already activated. They orient like other bones in a chain. Say you're putting a fan bone in an elbow, to affect the spline ring through the center of the elbow. Both the forearm bone and the fan bone will be children of the upper arm bone; orient the fan bone like the forearm, with its pivot at the same place. Add the Orient Like constraint, make its target the forearm bone, and set it to 50%. As the arm bends, the fan bone will rotate in the same direction as the forearm, but only move halfway.