Godfrey

Blue? Interesting! What's the resolution on your skin textures? They look fairly big.

What happens when you do an actual render on it? I frequently encounter oddly-shaped patches which distort their decals in real-time shaded mode, but which look fine when you do a final-quality render on them.

Judging from his phrasing, I'm guessing that English isn't Mr. MM's primary language; if so, it wouldn't be too surprising if he takes what he reads at face value and misses the ironic intent.

Noah, That's some amazing skin in this image. Is that an image map or materials?

Looks great! Nice lipsynch, very nice modeling (I envy your hands). Only one comment about the animation, and that's when she looks off to the side, trying to think of the word which escapes her; her right eye (viewer's left) moves uncomfortably far into the corner (though maybe that's an undead thing). And a really minor audio critique: as great as the voices sound, they're not in the scene. A little reverb (small room, with not too much damping) would really place them into the bathroom environment with the models. I hope you do! They're really inexpensive to make, as Sacman has intimated. A wooden embroidery hoop, some stiff wire, a microphone clip and a pair of pantyhose will make one that works well, doesn't look half bad (see attachment) and costs about $5 (less if you make more than one, as a single pair of hose is good for at least four filters, even with three layers of fabric in each one).

My main contribution was the soundtrack; to expand a little on what Zach's already said, I used the MIDI file he sent me as the basis for the tempo. I scrapped all the actual note data, and played in each individual part on my keyboard, both to give it more of a human feel, and because of the peculiar way Garritan Personal Orchestra handles dynamics (using a mod wheel instead of keystrike velocity). Once that was done, I sent him a stereo recording of the instrumental tracks, and he recorded Don Ivory and Leporello-bob's parts (as well as a couple instances of him singing the Coro di Duckies' part). He sent those all back to me individually, and I recorded myself as Il Dispensadore and a few more Coro voices. Then I put all the tracks together and created panning envelopes for each of the principal voices to match their positions on (or off) screen. Finally, I ran the various elements through SIR for some nice convolved reverb (I used a couple of different impulses from an 1800-seat auditorium). But I think Zach gives me too much credit; pretty much everything you see visually is his work. I only modeled some of the minor set dressing (toothpaste, toothbrushes, pill bottles and the like) and painted some dirt maps. All the characters and the set itself (and the fantastic lighting, which I first saw during the final render) were done by Zach.

I'm hoping Zach will post a close-up of the "Greetings from East Timor" postcard. The QuickTime really doesn't do it justice, and it made me laugh out loud when I got a look at the small details.

And yet I'm grateful for it. :-)

That's the weird thing. Something about the skylight rig is making the material more opaque than I intended it to be. Here's what it looks like in an action, with only a single light: And this is what it looks like in the choreography: I guess I'll have to do some tweaking in order to get it looking right. But of course! I guess English law works much differently than American law... Well, someone else has already done a bang-up job on that front. I honestly don't know how I could improve on his design. Thank your fiancé for me! Well, if he finds one, ask him to let me know! If I can find good enough reference for it, sure. I was lucky enough to find an excellent set of plans for the vintage Daleks here.

A little update, with a lighter Dalek in the foreground as smudge suggested: Still haven't done much texturing on them; I've been working on something else as well. Also, I didn't use a rim light, but changed from a hemispherical skylight into a spherical one, to simulate some "bounce" from the grass. The older Dalek's head lamps are now the right shape for his 1960s paint job. And just for grins, a quick test of the "Dalek Version" pose slider (twelve of the seventeen positions available so far): Click either image for a larger version.

Very good idea, thanks! As I said, I've got a lot of texturing work to do. The BBC just layered each paint job over the previous one, not bothering to fill in dings and chipped paint, so I'll be using a lot of different maps for the textures. There were four different light-dome shapes for the head (not including the ridiculous jelly jars they used on the Supreme Dalek in one episode). I'm going to be putting all of the different Dalek types into the same model, using pose sliders to change the color schemes, hardware variants, and so forth. There was also a Dalek with a sieve instead of a plunger (I guess even Daleks need to clean their pools sometimes). I'm not sure if I'll be doing that one. Well, they used to be people, but were mutated into giant slugs by an evil scientist. So I guess the toilet plunger was a step up from their regular bodies.

Yes, they're color schemes from two different eras. The one on the left is an earlier model, circa 1966, and the one on the right is from an episode broadcast in 1975. Though the dome lights are the wrong shape for the one on the left; I'll have to fix that. THEN THEY WILL BE EX-TER-MI-NA-TED!

Well, Daleks outside the house, at any rate. Still have a lot of texturing work to do, but I thought I'd throw this up there for commentary, especially from other Dr. Who fans about how I can improve the shape. The plunger arm does extend, though I forgot to show it here. Click on the image for a much larger version.

13.72, but I had to "cheat" a bit by enlarging the near foot. (I tried doing it without cheating, with a shorter focal length, but the ground plane broke up when I rendered.)

I render to a 32x32 Targa with the alpha channel enabled. Then I use The GIMP to re-save it as a PNG, and then use @icon sushi to convert it into an icon. (If only @icon sushi read Targas, or A:M wrote PNGs...) To replace a desktop shortcut's icon, right-click on it and select "Properties", then click the "Change Icon..." button. Browse to wherever you saved the icon, and select it. The nice thing about @icon sushi is that it's the only freeware icon editor I know of that can read/write Windows XP's alpha-blended icons.

Very nice!

Today, in a fit of boredom, I made a 3D Thom icon for A:M on my desktop, because it's silly for a 3D app to have a 2D icon. And then that project mutated into this:

With the hair, it reminds me of the old "Lemmings" game!

To expand on Jim's answer, once the model gets a certain distance from the camera, A:M starts creating mipmaps for the decal/patch images. Mipmaps help cut down on the speckly artifacts which occur when models in the distance are in motion; the tradeoff is a small loss of clarity under certain circumstances.

Nifty. I'd love to see a comparison shot in the Quake engine; I presume it didn't keep the models as smoothly rounded as your custom one?

Nice! But now the red one needs a pickup switch. That's an interesting way of "signing" the image! But I notice that it appears to be lit by a different source than the rest of the objects.

Here ya go.

Yeah, that's about right.

Been working on this for a couple of weeks, trying to make a realistic face model splined on the principles in Jason Osipa's book. Didn't really set out to make a self-portrait, but I knew my face would always be available for comparisons while I worked on it. Right now I'm stuck trying to make a decent ear before I CFA the other half. Once it's done, I'll try painting a skin (color, bump, specularity, etc.) from scratch.

Wow, that looks great! What game engine are you using?