largento

Did you move the model far away from the center axis in the model window?

Wow, Jeff! Great work! This is my first time seeing this thread. I'm sure the finished product is going to be amazing!

I could be wrong, but it sounds like you may be in mirror mode... try turning mirror mode off.

WOW, Lee... I mean... WOW wow :-) I feel bad for Stan Winston, since you're clearly going to upstage the movie suit. :-)

Thanks, Jeff! Yeah, the ears are really tough. Deceptively so, because you don't really think they are important until you start trying to make one and they don't come out right. Then they take away from the whole head. I forgot to give a word of thanks to Bill Gaylord. He modeled a simple ear for me and it was a great resource to look at while I was making this one. Most importantly, he showed me how to start the ear, which is key. (Thanks again, Bill!) Thanks, David! Another great catch. I went and looked at some profile shots on the web and saw what you meant about the roundness of the botttom lip. That was one of those things that I'd never noticed before. It was a much easier thing to fix. :-)

I'm pretty sure I'd pay $40 for it, but I'm certain I would pay $20. My interest is more in picking up modeling tips and tricks than in actually modeling a car, though. If I were interested in modeling a car, I'd pay the $40 without blinking.

Well, after enough stabs to fill up an Agatha Christie novel, I finally figured out how to attach the ears last night. It ended up not being nearly as difficult as I kept trying to make it... and wonders of wonders, when I went to attach it, I had the exact same number of splines to attach on the ear as the hole in the head. Nice when that happens. I'll probably spend a few sessions endlessly moving things around on it, but it's already an improvement. Thanks for the push, guys!

Thanks, Jeff! I'm going to take a stab at fixing the ears tonight.

Right. The top one is v3 and the bottom one is the 2nd version (the one in my avatar.) The only way I could get the old one to look good was when I used facial poses and kept it at pretty much a straight-on view... which was obviously pretty limiting. :-) Thank you, sir! I definitely feel like the v3 model is a step up, but of course, it's impossible for me to see it objectively. (I just hope six months from now, it still holds up to me!) :-) Some of my friends didn't understand why I was doing this remodel, thinking that it was basically throwing away all of the work I'd done up to this point, but I don't think of it that way. Thank you, David! Your crit is absolutely correct (and a reminder that I've still got aways to go with my modeling skills!) It is connected to the mesh on the back, but my attempt to connect the front part to the side of the face was spectacularly bad, so I opted for just tucking that part into the face. That's something I definitely need to re-visit down the line.

Hey Russell, it's easier to do this with a two-button mouse. The mighty mouse doesn't let you click both buttons at the same time. Do this: a) Click "a" to add a spline. Drag the spline out away from any other splines and then left click and right click to end the spline. c) Click and drag the end of that spline to the spline where you want to hook it and without letting go of the mouse button, hit the tilde key. You'll be able to tell it's a hook because the spline will no longer end in a control point. I ended up buying a 3rd party mouse so that I could do this with the mouse instead of having to use the keyboard. You may want to consider doing that if you find yourself doing a lot of modeling in A:M.

Thanks, Lee, Mark, Mike! Lee, hopefully the character will come through more once he's finished and rigged with facial poses. It really brought the old one to life. Your analogy reminded me of being a teenager and my friends and I had a term for what you described. We called them "Mall Girls." The girls you'd see far away in the mall and think "wow" and then when you finally got up close... not so wow. :-) Mark, I like a cartoony look, too. ...and I think I'm still going for that. Just not as broad of one as before. I think Lee was right about the nose. I think it's still cartoony, but I brought it back a little. Mike, I think I'm going in the right direction for me. That's not to say, I won't end up changing my mind, but I really am feeling good about the new model. I'll make this the last image until I complete the model, but here's a direct comparison of the v2 and v3 Kroks. Maybe not quite so startling a difference as between v1 and v2, but still a big one.

Thanks, Lee! When you say "other model" are you meaning the one I modeled 6 months ago, or the earlier version of this 3rd one (the Ernest Borgnine one)? There are definite elements that I liked about the one from 6 months ago (I'm calling it the v2 one), but he looked weird from most angles and the splines were not working very well for animation. In the end, I just wasn't satisfied with it. I knew I could do it better this time, so it just made sense to start with a fresh model. I'm working on the honing. :-) I've got the luxury of no deadline on this project, so I'm realizing that I don't have to settle and that part of getting better at this is just doing it, so I've been pushing and pulling CPs on this, trying to make it better. My guess is that at a certain point I'll get that spark of the character, then I'll pull it back a little to keep it cartoony. I haven't yet found that point, but I know I'm going to get there! ...eventually. :-) Here's another signpost on the trip:

Thanks, Jeff! I'm still messing with it. I realized when I went back and looked at it that I wasn't doing a good job of dimensionalizing the face. It was too flat. I spent some more time working on it and trying to rectify that. Still not quite there...

That came out of trying to make the front view look like the way I'd drawn him. I always did the hair with gaps in it, but lack-of-ability had me just settle at the time for the hair being solid. The gaps in the hair should break the hat rim illusion. At this point, he'll most likely end up looking less stylized in the remodel. The only pic I have with me at work is from the 2001 version. I went even more crazy with his ears in subsequent versions. The 1996 version wasn't nearly as wild and I'm thinking that I'm going to look back to that version for part of the remodel...

From Conan O'Brien to Ernie Borgnine... maybe I'm not making as much progress as I thought. :-) I guess there's no fighting it... after a round of "de-borgnification," I'm gonna' have to accept my fate and start doing some "shatnerfying." :-) That's an extremely helpful observation, though! Thanks!

Wow, somehow I made it through the whole month of July without updating. I got distracted working on the rooster character and I was also avoiding the inevitable... I realized at the time when I was starting to model these characters, that I would likely have to go back and remodel them once I had a better idea of what I was doing, but I kept putting it off. I've reached the point now, where I really want to move forward and this is a necessary step. It's been slow-going, but I began remodeling Krok about a week or so ago. I'm still playing with the head right now, but here's the foundation of it: I've scaled back some of the look and am trying to find a balance that I like. Last time out, I wasn't able to do the nose or ears very well. They're coming out much better this time. I really don't want to have to remodel him again down the line, so I'm taking my time and trying to get everything "right" this time. I ran into lots of issues while rigging the last version, so a big motivation behind doing this is to make a mesh that will animate better.

Thanks, everybody! Well, not exactly pink, but yeah, the gradient I used to get the look of felt, isn't working the way I wanted, and there's sort of a division of color.

Just felt like making something this morning, so I put together this Indiana Jones-style fedora. Figured I'd stick it up here if anybody finds a need for one. It's definitely not to scale and hardly perfect, but I thought it came out okay and thought I'd share. Here's a turnaround: indyhat.mov And the file: indyhat.zip

Here's a couple of tips that have helped me: 1) Try to keep the distance between splines even. Which is to say that if you have three parallel splines, try to keep the center one as close to the center between the other two as possible. 2) Use the movement restrictment keys when adjusting CPs: Holding down the modifying key when you drag the CP: 1-->restricts CP to x-axis 2-->restricts CP to y-axis 3-->restricts CP to z-axis 4-->restricts CP to the direction of the focus CP 5-->restricts CP to perpendicular of the focus CP 6-->restricts CP to the direction of the Normal Combining keys adds them together (ex. holding 1 & 2 lets the CP move in both the x and y-axis, but not in the z)

Made this quick little graphic to demonstrate the description:

Actually, it wasn't the lights that rotatated: This quote from a story about a guy who was able to borrow the 11-foot model to display at his college in 1972: The nacelle domes were white translucent hemispheres. Removing the exterior nacelle domes, there was a clear interior hemisphere with black lines that bisected the hemisphere, and this rotated at various controlled speeds. The starboard nacelle interior dome rotated clockwise, while the port side rotated counter-clockwise. Ten multicolored miniature Christmas lights were in each nacelle dome, just behind the rotating interior hemisphere. (Obviously when he's saying miniature Christmas lights, he's talking about the old-style Christmas lights which were considerably larger than the kind used today.)

Here's the rooster in his first appearance in 3D:

Or you could do this...

WOW, Lee! That's really incredible. I can only imagine how much time has gone into it. Even unfinished, it's amazing.

Great job, Vern! Cool concept and great execution. The handcuffs came out great and I'm sure they look better than a photo would have. ...'sides, with this, you can position them to fit your layout, rather than vice versa. I'm sure some folks don't realize how much of a reward there is in getting to do a project that isn't beaten to death by a client. Not quite as good as money, but pretty close!