Eric2575

Soon the terror will roam the land!! http://home.comcast.net/~pyglesias03/claw.avi

Where's the pool table and pinball machine? WHERE IS THE BEER? WHERE ARE THE WOMEN? Just kiddin...looking pretty moody!

Two ways come to mind: 1. easy way: Use a decal of a perfect hole and use it as a Cookie-Cut 2. hard way: work it into the splines Are you wanting the holes for the eyes? Post a wireframe of the mask - pretty sure you will want to remove some splines, judging from your UFO.

The reason I want to put it here is because I made a mask, and wanted to put round wholes in the front. But I couldn't figure out how to do that. If you have any suggestions it would be appreciated. I will add the wire frame when I get home today, so you can have a better idea of what I am talking about. Thanks again James Please clarify - you want to put holes in the UFO, some kind of mask, or ??

Small note: On the bottom of your landing gear, you created four three point patches to close the end. This creates the crease and point in the middle. Unless you want that effect, try deleting the center cp and just use the four corner cps to close the bottom. Remeber, you need at least two splines to create a patch. If the four cps on the bottom only have one spline running through them (which I suspect), then you need to delete one section of the spline and add a second spline to close the patch. I attached a pic to try and show how.

If you are using a PC, just open your model in wireframe mode and hit "PRT SCR" on your keyboard. That will place the current view in memory. Open any paint program such as Photoshop or even just good ol windows paint, crop the image to what you want to show and save as JPG. Once saved, go to WIP forum and show your work. You will need to browse to your JPG under the file attachments heading. Pretty much the same steps for a MAC I believe, just don't know the keyboard shortcut for screencapture. Hope I didn't misunderstand and told you nothing new. I like your foray into animation. Keep it up.

Ok, finally got the rotoscopes to the point of where I feel I can work with them in AM. Bought a scale model of a Saleen S7, took a ruler and caliper and made some rotoscopes in Photoshop. What a pain! Here is my first piece made with the new roto's. More to follow quickly now.

Yes, I would like to get something close to realistic. I saw a car once that Ives helped with the paint reflectivity, and it looked awesome. Ives, if you read this, your help is always welcome. As far as texturing, are you referring to the rear grille? That's just a quick cookie cut. Other than that, there is no texturing on the model yet. The specularity looked really good when I did a quick render, but it got pretty diffused when I goofed around with multi-pass, buffers and so on. I just wanted to see what some of the different options would do to the scene.

This is my first attempt at a car. Had to take a break from modeling my T-Rex. Didn't know where to start, so I started to model the view most people would see if they ever got close to one in real life. It shouldn't be hard to figure out which car this is - I hope And yeah, I know the lighting sucks.

Very smooth surfaces, that's not so easy to do. Looks great so far, can't wait to see more.

Thanks Rodney, thanks Den for the kind words: Amazing what a little pat on the back can do for someone when they had a long day. I will work on some textures and decals for Rex and see if I can't make him a little more realistic.

Haven't had much time to work on Rex, but here is an update. Tweaked the shoulders down a bit, worked on the arms and hands and changed the eye socket slightly. I'm not sure I like the eye socket and will tweak that some more. Put a bump map on him to rough up the skin and just shaded him to see some color - just a test. Will paint on his mesh next. Looking at him, I think that the connection between the body and the legs needs to be pulled up a bit to create a more defined crease between belly and leg. The inside of the mouth also need lots more TLC. Suggestions, comments?

Looks great so far. One thing - in both versions, the eyes are buggin me. To me (which doesn't mean much) the eyes look a bit beedy and a bit too similar from character to character. I know they are charicatures, but some of them also have the eyes set too far apart. A little more variety in the eyes with bigger pupils IMHO. The way you have them may just be the style you are after, so take what I've said with a grain of salt

It's a little hard to tell from the images, but it doesn't look as bad as you make it seem. The splines don't all have to line up perfectly because you will not have a perfectly symmetrical limb. As a matter of fact, it will look much more natural if some of the spline rings will be off like yours. In the first pic, the bottom spline ring looks like it was pulled in a different direction than the preceding ring - maybe you manipulated it from another view and didn't realize it was doing this. This is nothing a little tweaking can't fix. You mentioned that some of your 5 point patches don't close. If you select the 5 points and the "5 point patch button" doesn't light up in the tool bar, hit the "." key twice and it should work. If it still doesn't, you have some cp's that aren't connecting somewhere. If you want, you can send me your model and I will take a look at it. Let me know with a PM. If I find bad stuff, I will screencapture so you see what is bad, then I will fix it - screencap that too, then send you the fixed file. Your'e doing fine, be patient. Eric

Roger, here's the drumstick stitched together from four extruded tubes and then tweaked. You need to get a feel of how the cp's move as you are turning the model. Once you have that, it will feel like sculpting. Hope this helps. Eric

Very professional looking - you've got it right! I'll be very happy when I can just play around and produce something like that. Cheers Eric

Ok, I knew this would be difficult. Over the last few days I searched the forum and read as many tuts as I could find on bones and rigging. If I had to rig a human figure, I would just take the AM rig out of Thom and transfer it. I could find nothing on bones and rigs for a creature like the T-rex. I really don't want to do this from scratch because it seems like something very advanced for someone who hasn't done anything with bones, etc. Before you fly a jumbo jet, you have to learn to fly a Cessna. Should I try and modify the Thom rig to work in the T-rex? What would you guys do? What steps did you take when you first started working with bones to animate? Please give me something I can work with.

Hey, you don't seem to realize that my T-rex is on steroids, that's why the big neck and arms - he's in training I'll rework him a bit with your suggestions. Next comes the part I dread - bones and rigging. I have never done that before and it looks messy and difficult...argh

Maybe you can animate the windows to vibrate to the sound of a boom box

Here is a render of the reworked arms and a tweak on the legs for a better stance and ground contact. I want to do a short animation with this guy, would someone be willing to take a look at the model and show me where I might have problems with creases, etc? Thanks

Trust me, you will need patience if you want to create some of the awesome works that are possible with AM. Once you learn some of the tricks of the trade, so to speak, you'll really start to enjoy the process. Good luck and enjoy.

The first thing you need to do is go through all the tutorials in the book. I know you want to get right down to the meat of things, but as the saying goes, learn to crawl before you can walk...etc. In terms of modeling a character, the fighter plane tutorial, excercise 10, and the giraffe tut, excercise 11 are very helpful. You need to get basic splinemanship down before doing anything. Again, browse the forum and do the book's excercises first.

Hi Dana - and welcome to the forum. First off, Rodney is the moderator for this forum and he is the Mother Goose of AM land. Rodney, hats off to you, your help is always appreciated and can always be counted on. Personally, I found that checking into the various forums here has been of tremendous value to me. Start out by reading some of the posts you find interesting and then using the search function at the top of the page to get specific info on the topic you are interested in. You'll be amazed at how many other users have already asked the same questions you will most likely encounter. The AM forums are filled with talented and helpful users, never lacking encouragement for novice and advanced users alike. Hope this didn't come off like a commercial, but you couldn't have picked a better forum to immerse yourself in. Good luck and hope you crank out some awesome models pretty soon.

Thanks for the kind words and the suggestions. I agree with all of them. Turning out the legs a bit is a great idea. Yes, he is balancing on the feet right now - gonna work on that too. Glad to have a better ref for the arm - thank you. Gonna get to work and will update soon - maybe even tonight.

Love it! The knobbies are great and I also like the small detail around the axle nut. Are the spoke a little thick, or is that just my imagination? Can't wait to see more. Good job.