Eos

Nice futuristic tv and cool effect with the screens.

Finished! After lots of work with modelling a dragon for the image contest I just finished it, and here it is. Hope you like it.

Congrats, that's an awsome car!

Thanx for all the comments! I noticed the head being lighter than the body, Ken. I think there's a slight difference in the color maps, so i fixed it. I modeled the rock and did a quick texture and bump map using a photograph i found on Internet. FINISHED!! After days of hard work and learning, i just finished this afternoon. You can check the final image in the Showcase area. Im very proud of it and i think i can start thinking about the animated dragon now. Again, thanx for the suggestions, comments and opinions. Eos

Another view. There's something wrong with the lights. I can't make good shadows and some parts of the dragon don't look good because of the light or bump parameters, i think. By the way, the last image is supposed to have flying dragons in the background, but I haven't put them yet.

Update! This is the idea i have for the final image.

Newbert, I don't plan to make an animated clip of this dragon... yet. But as soon as I finish the image for the Hash contest, I'll do it. I want to see it flying, roaring and crushing innocent people with bursts of fire too. It might be kind of hard but I rigged it to make possible the motion, so expect coming prevs, maybe in another WIP thread. No pearl, sorry. I don't plan to recreate any Chinese or Christian tale with this guy, It's mostly my own and personal perception of a dragon as a majestic and powerful creature; sure, more magical than biological, but a beast in all the sense of the word. When I first thought of it, I imagined how would it behave if it was real. Sure not like a cute little bunny. I painted the textures in photoshop and used a few high quality photographs of reptiles to emulate the scale pattern and some colors and details (like the iguana ear). I'd never done this kind of texture mapping before, so I guess it was a good start. The bump map was done completely by hand and it still hurts. The most difficult part was the wing webs. I did them completely from scratch since I couldn't find a good skin pattern. I recently made a texture just for the wing transparency, so it looks even better now. My regards to Den Deauvais. Those dragons are veery cool. I wish i can come out with an image like that. Thanx for all the comments! More to come!

Nice and scary. Keep up and make some vudu to your computer. Sometimes I've thought that there should be a computer ritual like those they make to bring up the dead. Imagine the witch doctor in front of a PC, dancing and shaking a chicken in front of the screen, shouting "Control... alt...supr... I forbid thee!"

It's not my intention to go off-topic but, wow that's an incredible mask! Are the teeth for real? I don't mind either that your dragon is green like mine, your airbrush art is fantastic by the way (it also means that i have no intentions to change mine just because it's green too, actually i couldn't think of another color for a dragon than green, well maybe red) Keep up the good work! I can't wait to see those fellas fight each other in incarnated battle!

Every time you post some update about that car it gets better and better! Congratulations! I can almost hear the Speed Racer theme. The window looks better now, although the metal wheels have a strange reflection.

Another still. Thanx for all the comments! Next step: planning the final scene.

I won't forget to make backups, Scott. You never know... Finished! Here's the flying pose with all the textures and materials. I'm exhausted!

I know how does that feel... I've lost tons of work just because the hardrive decides somehow to collapse. Keep up the good spirit and consider this a good chance to correct mistakes and do certain things over again. You'll discover that it ends better than if you didn't lost it. Those were bad news

Small (well, not that small) update: I finished the main and bump map, still gotta do some work on the horns, teeth and some other things, but what do you think so far? I'm wondering about the specular size and intensity map. I don't know how to make one that can give a snake-skin sort of look in the dragon's. Thanx for the comments!

Well... who knows? maybe its Mr. Jage's mission on Earth... By the way, It's so peculiar that almost everyone that steps in the WIP forum gives a comment of this post... its almost like it has gravity or something. Is it the title? I'm definitely going to use this example for future posts. For example my dragon. If I had put the title as "Dragon God", would it attract the attention more of all of you guys? That's something to think about if anyone wants to be noticed when posting a model, animation or A:M project. Also i consider that there has to be a reason why we're still discusing whether this initial post has something to do with animation or not, instead of simply stop posting replies to it and continue our lives. Maybe it's that God is a particularly interesting subject. Maybe some of us just feel like writing our daily philosophary thoughts and Mr Jage just made the ideal place with this post. So i'm back to my animation work and leave this small temple. It has become a temple because of all the different ideas clustered into it. Personally, my religion is animation so im going back to my A:M projects.

Oh, just got it. It seems that you actually did a beveling in the calculator and the buttons. Maybe the blue color kinda hid it. Override the last comment about them.

Emmm.... Vash.... Where's the zero? What kind of calculator doesn't allow you to put the number 0? Anyway it's looking good so far. I would recommend the beveling too. The blue color makes hard to see the details, but it can be solved in the final image with the specularity or reflections. Could you post a wire? I still can't identify 2000 patches there.

This sounds like a challenge! Can't wait to finish the texturing and send my dragon to battle against yours! It looks good! Although the pieces of hanging skin under the yaw don't look very real.

Couldn't resist the temptation to see it in the sitted post, still with the wireframe map.

Finished mapping the areas! Here's the full textured mesh. I'll start painting the real textures now.

Thanx for the advice, I read the whole tutorials and it really helped, although I'm still a rookie on photon mapping and radiosity. This is an update. I'm doing the mapping for the dragon's face, and right now I'm with the rest of the body. The textures don't match perfectly, but I'm sure the color and the final bump and specularity channels will make a good result.

Nice work! I think sometimes you should let your creations create themselves, if it somehow looks better even if it doesn't match your first plans, then go for it. It is a cartoon, so most of the times the views of it doesn't match each other accurately... Maybe the best to do next is to build the car bottom and the wheels, I think. Eos

Cool model! I was shocked when I read... 13,000 patches! Man, I was going nuts with my dragon and it ended with just 5,000! I thought nobody could handle that...

Thanx for all the comments! Lately I've been doing some other things so I haven't started the texturing yet. I continued my pose experiments to see how would it look if it was sort of majestic-but-calmed, like a statue. I quickly made a sitted one and modeled a platform, then I played around in photoshop to add a background. It is now my desktop wallpaper. I think I'm not going to stress myself with the definitive scene yet, maybe after putting all the textures and materials and playing a little bit with the lights I'll come with the solution. BTW, I had a problem when I tried to make a radiosity image. I made a choreography with the sitted dragon, no ground and just one rim light. I turned on the radiosity module, put 10,000 photons cast, 1000 in sample area, 100 photon samples, 100% of intensity, 20 max bounces, turned on the caustics, the final gathering and the precompute gathering. I made a few marquee tests and it worked just fine. But then, when I made the final render, It froze. I had to reset the computer and try again. Nothing, it froze again. The strange part was that it also froze when doing the marquee tests. I thought it was because of the choreography, so I started a new one and put the dragon again and it froze! I haven't been able to make a radiosity image since then. Does anyone knows what happened? It was my first time on doing radiosity, so I really don't know how to do a good one. The only thing I knew was that you use one light, hahaha

Thanx for your comments! I don't know very much about map applying in A:M, I heard somewhere about the Alpha Channel as a way of adding transparence, but couldn't exactly solve how to include it in the decal mode... If you make an Alpha channel in Photoshop, for example, and export it as TGA, would it be included when you apply the decal in A:M? I'll give it a shot to see what happens. Something that bothered me with my texture is that the two decals (diffuse and transparency) didn't match accurately. I think i'll make a test with alpha channel, just to see if it gets better.