Morphy

Mike, thanks for the tips. I still have an AWFUL lot to learn about spines, but at least with splines I've managed to create my first humanoid figure - something I never managed to do when I dabbled with polys. I think I'll keep various versions of this figure as a 'lab rat' and perform weird experiments on it in an attempt to see what works better (or worse). Ken, It really IS an underlying mess - I was actually going to post a pic showing the splines, but I chickened out! Some three-point patches, lots of large 5-points, and hooks in all sorts of places where there probably ought not to be hooks! But hey, this time a couple of weeks ago I didn't even know what a 3 or 5-point or hook was. I feel a bit the same as the first time I did a drawing with a pencil: I could see it was far from great, but got the feeling that 'if I keep practising this, I could get to be OK at it...' With the face, I found the biggest problem was that it looked like it was modeled from a wet paper bag or something, and didn't really look as if there were bones and muscles under the skin. A quick question, if anyone has time to answer - One of the things I found hardest was to stitch the ear to the head. It got me wondering... Is there any definite advantage to stitching it (ie, making the whole model connected)? Would it be 'wrong' to make the ear a separate entity and just position it against the head without any stitching? Sort of like the eyes or teeth, but on the outside? Thanks again, guys.

I'm still just a few inches off the ground, at the foot of the A:M learning curve. After some messing around with tutorials, I decided to have a shot at making a figure of my own. I think this Work In Progress is probably just progressing towards the trashcan - it has too many splines in some places and not enough in others, endless 3 and 5-point patches, some dead-end splines and lots of other bad stuff ('cos I don't yet know how to do it better). But I thought that making a figure of my own (complete with errors that will make it difficult or impossible to rig and animate) might be the quickest way to learn WHY models have to be built in a particular way. But even if he won't work, I'm kinda pleased with how the face turned out.

I have to be honest here... I'd been dithering for quite a while, wondering whether to purchase A:M or not. Then I discovered the movies pages. watched some of them and was very impressed. Then I saw the 'hunter dynamics' move, and got my credit card out on the spot! Morph

That's really well done. Sorry I can't offer any advice on the vertical streaks - except to say that I think they look OK. To me, it looks like hot rocks falling near the camera, rather than any sort of error.

Hi, Philip - the volcano is shaping up well! I don't think you can upload avi files here. You can use a movie gif, but there's a size limit of one meg, I think.