JohnArtbox

Hi Will, looks great. I have three suggestions, If the saucer settled into the sand, ie there was some give in the legs and the disks sank into the sand slightly it would increase then sense of weight when it settled. Some particle effects on the sand as the struts moved. A projected light pattern on the ground which moved with the saucers light would make it sit better, especially with a couple of matching bounce lights. And some bloom, although I always do this in the composite, would help match live action.

Time for my daily update, two days into the project an I'm half a day late already. Thanks for the comments. I'll try thickening the lower torso and upper legs on my hero at least. These intitial models are templates, basic body shapes that I can then use to create multiple characters. The hero model will probably be altered to create a superhero team. The new guy is Timmy, a little boy. He's very much a WIP and currently looks more like an evil halfing but I'm going to use this thread to detail the project. Good and bad, I'll live with it. I'm going to take an intial run at all of the characters before I go back and revise them because then I'll be able to see them in context as a cast(and in clothes).

Thanks for the comments Guys. Grubber, I like the rendered look. Mike, Yup, reality's been done, I'm going absurd. Bizzle, I'll try it and see what happens. I'm only a few hours in at the moment and my main aim was to pull it into the shape of the sketch. I'm verging between a case of 3d / 2d imbalance and really liking the awkwardness. Gudi I'll post hires images as I get to land mark points, it's going to be a long trip. Nerrazzi, the lighting is a from a spinning light right generated from a utility I wrote called Skycast. There's a free beta on my website here Skycastbeta It's like a fast skydome built for the multipass renderer, it uses two soft shadow kleigs and a specular kleig

And for those who don't have broadband, here's a jpeg

A cartoony superhero underway. This model is going to act as a generic base to build a variety of muscle bound superheroes for a short film. download size 170k. I wrote the film for a submission about 6 years ago, but at that point had no spare time. My daughter's now 5 so I thoiught it was about time to leave the commercial work for a while and do something fun. Comments welcome hero.mpg

you can comb the trees upright and you could also remove the trees on the cliffside using the density feature. You could probably reverse gravity on the materials and have it pull the trees upright as well

I've posted the project files for this project , including the forest and foliage materials at the end of the Alpha1 Hair thread here.Forest and Foilage Project Enjoy...

I modelled in the alpha, but the groundplane is only 60 patches plane, and the sky is a 32 patch flattened dome. Everything is in the materials.The trees are the only alpha specific feature. Here's an mpeg, which everyone should be able to play.( 3x3 multipass) flythrough.mpg

and here's the Darktree file for anyone who wants to use it with simbiont 2.5. Because it's only a test the scale is quite small(trees are 20cm high) but somebody may find it useful grassandrocks.zip

and because I can't seem to post more than one file per message here's a flythough. It's less than 200k MaterialLandscape.zip

Extending on from the tree making threads this is a test project , with only two planes and three materials. The sky is skytracer, the landscape is a darktree landscape texture which shades surfaces facing up with a grass like texture and vertical surfaces with a rocky surface. The forest is an AM11 fur material with tree images mapped onto the fur "strands". The animation render is a single pass multipass so there are quite a few artifacts. With some fine tuning of fur emmitters I think the trees can be considerably improved and the lighting is only test lighting. Still I thought it was worth showing

great little animation