mooncaine

Thanks for that great explanation, Dearmad. I'm glad I asked, because at first, I thought you might have meant that a "practical" light was a real world light, and I was puzzled. Thanks!

I don't know about the shadows debate -- my ignorance is blissful, for the time being. Anyway, just wanted to add: don't forget the pickup selector switch...

I like the cat, too. Um, what do you mean by "practical"?

One thing that might help the white plastic bits: make sure that no colours you specify are "pure" [as in 255/255/255, or 100% of R,G or B]. That's yet another tip I picked up from Bill Young's Mastering Materials series, and again I recommend it highly because, whether you want to master materials or not, you'll encounter dozens of such juicy tips while watching them. Bill says we should never use a completely pure colour in our 3D because there are no such completely pure colours in life. This leads us to subconsciously assess a 3D image with a pure colour in it as somehow unrealistic without our realizing what's bothering us about the image. If the Strat you're modeling has any age to it at all, the white will have probably yellowed, or maybe even greened a tiny bit.

I'd pose Standing FuFu so that it leans a little farther forward -- in fact, I'd flex its body forward a bit at the hips. Even without the plume, Standing FuFu looks like s/he's leaning backwards, defying gravity a bit.

An idea to make it look scarier: put it in a Chor, and adjust the camera so it's looking slightly UP at the beast. Adjust the Focal Length to a small number [experiment with this]. As you adjust the focal length, watch how the image changes. You're changing the lens of your virtual camera into a wide angle lens, as wide angle as the number you're setting. A wide-angle shot looking up at it will likely make it look larger and scarier.

Thanks for the image directing my attention to the darn box that's been there all along. I appreciate your patience; I hadn't noticed it at all.

If you're into making Clay look like he's made of clay, DarkTree has a really good clay texture, complete with little thumb dents [no actual fingerprint whorls], and it's a procedural texture, so you can get as close as you like to it with your camera. Someone suggested he should have a cool surname. I vote for Clay Foote.

How are you attaching those files to these forum posts, anyway? Is it something any of us can do, or only a special privilege? Mouseover text in my browser shows links to www.hash.com, but I thought we couldn't attach files to posts. Anyway, I'm curious .....

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is just so darn busy. Yep, I'm interested -- in the past, I might have been able to offer a room full of computers with A:M for the meet, but my workplace has changed things around and I don't have access to such things anymore. I'm only just now restarting my 3D efforts after taking a lot of time away from it to concentrate on other things, so yesterday is pretty much my first day back at these forums since .... oh, since the creation of the forums. I have missed a lot, and missed a lot of you. Sadly, I won't get to come to SIGGRAPH this year, which bums me out, and makes the prospect of a SouthEast users' group meeting even more desirable to me. Let's plan for something months away, though, if we can -- at least, that would make it easier for me to attend. By the end of summer, I may even be living in a different home, with room for the meet or for one of us to stay overnight as my guest -- I'm hoping, but so far haven't found the house yet. I'll be looking during the summer.

Didn't see if anyone mentioned this, but here's a really nitpicky thing you might not care about: the neck's too wide at the nut for most Strats. Fenders tend to have narrow fingerboards anyway, and the vast majority of Strats are narrower at the nut than at the heel where the body joins the neck. Only a small number of Strat models offer wide necks, and even those taper a bit from heel to nut. I also see you didn't choose to model a string tree or two for the peghead, which is yet another really minor thing. I LOVE this.

Well, I'm back after a long hiatus, and what do I find on my first day back in the forums but this superb modeling of a Strat, the very thing that had been driving me crazy off & on for over a year. You should see my poor attempts to get a good model of a Strat or Tele body. Hoby Jeebus, what a great job you've done! You're inspiring me at just the right moment -- as I begin to find time to once again work on my own art and on my own short. My humble offer of assistance: Here's a link to some nice pics of guitars that have been intentionally worn and stained to look like vintage guitars -- I think it might be a great reference site for pics of good wear and stains. Hope it helps in some small way. They call this kind of work 'relicing', from the word 'relic', but it looks weird the way they spell it -- you'd think it rhymes with 'icing' but instead it rhymes with 'picking'. Also, if you care, I have a book all about how to properly date a Stratocaster [awright, Vern, no wise cracks outta you, mister]. It has all the info on what year of Strat has what size of dots on the fingerboard, what kind of decal, etc. If you need scans from it or references from it, I'll be glad to help if I can. PM me if so. James Poulakos

I'm just .... awed. Incredible. I was going to ask you about 5-point patches; I see you've already mentioned that. I feel almost ashamed to offer a critique -- this is really fine work -- but you asked, so I will simply say that you might want to revisit the joints of some of the models -- elbows, ankles, shoulders, and wrists -- and adjust them further. Occasionally I see joints that suffer a bit from the same problems most of us seem to encounter with spline models. Joints seem just a bit too much like pipes or tubes that are crimping a bit. I'll PM you a link to an image that shows some examples of what I mean. Your Greek statues are so good I'm gonna lose sleep just thinking about all this!

I took a look at your production notes and was glad to see that materials can now be animated on groups, not merely on an entire model [i just tested it]. Having just watched a sorry movie about Ted Bundy while I was A:M-ing, I found the following quote unintentionally creepy: "Got the little girls all rigged up and I'm really pleased with their bone layouts." No reflection on you.

Yeah, you wanna watch those guys with the small hands, especially if they are carny people who smell like cabbage.