Eric2575

Why are the two balls on his side floating in the air? Where are his arms? Does he have arms? Is he finished? Does he walk or float or fly? Are those legs or small jet cones below his body? What kind of movement does the rigging produce? Will you make a small animation with him? Is this project just for fun or for something work related? Tell us why you made him. Nice start, looks like it has promise.

Everything is working fine now. Thank you Stian, and thank you Nancy for the great tip on kliegs and z buffered shadows. This thread should be moved to "Tips and Tricks."

Making sure the images are fully loaded solved the blue screen problem. Now I have a smaller problem. In your tut, you say to turn off all models except the ground model, sphere, and camera, to render the background image. When I do that, the ground plane is obviously rendered, making the resultant render useless for a background. Is that a glitch in the instructions? Shouldn't the ground model also be turned off? I actually tried turning off the ground model and got a nice background render. When I placed that in front of the camera (rotoscope) and rendered with all models turned on and ground model front projection target turned on, I noticed that the ground model was darker than the rotoscoped background, making the ground model stick out like a sore thumb. I seem to be missing one step somewhere? Btw, when rendering the background, no multipass is required, right?

Picky, picky, picky....just kidding, yes, I agree The front end has already been reworked and is starting to look more like the reference now. I am again out of town and cannot update now, but will do so as soon as I'm back.

Thanks for the quick reply Stian. I noticed that the larger images were taking some time to load, just did not relate it to this problem. Glad to hear that this is not an isolated event. I'll load the images first and see what happens.

Stian, I followed your tutotrial on putting a model and image based lighting together as described in your Ecto thread: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...hl=ghostbusters The problem I am having has been narrowed down to the Global Ambiance Type in the Chor settings. When I set that to Image based Lighting while using a Dosh Designs Light Probe image, I get an image saturated with bright blue - see image. I've changed to another Light Probe image with the same results. The other settings are as per your tutorial - Ambiance intensity 100%, Ambiance occlusion 100%, mapping type - Light Probe, Exposure - 0, Azimuth - 0. All lights are off with the ground model's Front Projection Target set to "On." Any ideas?

Al, that is looking so fine!!! You are getting better and better with every model/update. The detail is crazy on this one. You gotta put this one in some kind of scene to show it off. Keep it up

The front of the car is giving me a bit of trouble since it's actually quite complex. I'll have to do some trial and error to see what will work the best. Here is a start to getting some details up front.

Thanks for the comments. KNBITS: In many instances I will let patches go through other patches, but normally not something as large as a fender. In this instance I did it because the prototype has such sharp lines in that area. Many times I will go back later and actually join sections like the giraffe tutorial in the book. I've read several times that some modelers use a lot of splines in the beginning and then delete what's not needed. I've actually developed in the opposite modeling direction. My models tend to start out with minimal splines and then I add as needed. Works for me pretty well. Marcos: I haven't kept track of the modeling contests lately and did not intend to enter this one either. If this month is mechanical, I may enter something if time permits.

Here ya go.

Wow, I didn't know about shift click not warping existing splines. I've been working with AM for a few years now and am still just scratching the surface. Thanks for the tip

Sorry for the confusion, but the pic on the right is actually a photo for my reference of the car. I can only hope to get my work to look like that once it's done. Here is an update.

Put my tank aside for a bit and started on this.

Before attaching anything to the circle, make a copy of it and then lock the copy. Now attach the lines to the original without worrying about the warping. Once you've finished attaching your lines, you can use the locked copy of the circle as a guide for tweaking the warped circle. You will need to tweak the bias handles of the warped circle to match the locked circle. I hope I'm making sense. Once you get the hang of this method, it will become second nature.

I believe there is an option under the hair properties called "object collision". Someone may have some idea about that, but it may work.

Excellent work!

Make sure your rotoscopes are the best you can reasonably find and be sure they are the same scale on all sides. (This is actually a little on the advanced side - you should learn modeling basics before even starting a model that needs a rotoscope.)

I have to agree with Marcos; you are also one of my inspirations, starting with the awesome railcar you made. Beautiful model!

Nice call, Caroline

That's something you can be proud of Marcos!

Check your frames. Maybe you are rendering a frame before you turned lens flare on. Make sure you are rendering from frame 1 to frame 1 - hopefully frame 1 is the frame that has lens flare turned on.

Have you tried it without any models in the chor, just the ground plane and the bulb light? Try increasing the flares intensity.

Can you tell us why you would use both a normal map and a bump map? I thought a normal map was a step above a bump map?

I'm not on my AM computer, so I can't verify, but I've had the same problem before. It's usually something as mundane as not having the light turned on or similar. Why don't you turn off every other light and see if you even get any light at all. If you do, then start checking all other attributes. Is it a klieg, bulb, sun?

Very professional looking Matt! Great job!