Sacman

Awesome website and I love the rat!!!

Everyone has to make an alien head out of the head they started that was supposed to be super extra added bonus photo real but kept looking like an alien. This I think is why we see so many alien heads. Jus kidding, looks great. Wade

Okay so I stared at the original photo for a bit before I finally read the post. I couldn't figure out what CLEAT meant. Am I the only one? Wade

Okay, the trampoline is really messing me up. At first I was focused on the aliens and thought maybe someone was jumping on it. On my second view I realized something was wrong. It almost looks like a simcloth animation but I don't think that's it. So what is the deal with the trampoline. Is the wind blowing it around or what? I'm confused and I have now watched it like 20 times. Other than that, I really love live action cg composites and this one is cool. Wade

For what appears to be a free application, the Celtx program mentioned earlier in this thread is pretty cool. Here is the link again in case anyone missed it Celtx. The most impressive part about it is the script report ability. You can take a written script and break it down into locations, dialog, props, just about any kind of filtering needed to streamline the production process. Dunno if it would be as useful for animation but for live action, it looks pretty awesome.....and free..... Wade

I was just at Will's house this past weekend. The beauty of living only 20 minutes away. I will be there so I hope at least Colin is coming with all his chilren (SP on purpose) and his other half. I will prolly bring my wife and children but she will insist on driving seperate so she can leave when she wants. For the 100's of copies they have sold at DragonCon over the years, you would think there would be more. Hope to see more peeps there, Wade

Come on give the guy some more info. Go here Simbiont The Simbiont procedurals are basically darktree materials that you can use without having darktree. There are eyes and a whole lot more materials on there. You can tweak many of the settings to get the look you want and unless you are going for super photo real, this will be more than enough. Good luck, Wade

Wait I am working on one too so I want in on the trash talk. I really like the feet and the texturing on the armor. I assume you used displacement maps or bump maps for the lines in the armor? The added details like the cables running throughout really add to the believability. Nice job, Wade

Yeah it is all made to scale. I actually got real measurements off of each piece of equipment, the boxes, the pallets, the tables, everything. During the time I was in that department I had a lot of free time. I have since changed to sales with the same company but a different branch and have no real interaction with the production department so it stalled. I learned a lot doing this though and it was fun to exactly replicate it minus the dirt. It got a lot of oohs and ahs during its hey day. Thanks, Wade

Some time ago I did this layout for where I work. I had some kind of misguided notion that I was gonna do something great with it but never even really finished it. I like how far i got though. Now that the work requirement is behind you, You should make an animation. Zoom in enough so that the left side of the conveyor is off screen so that the boxes don't have to come from nowhere and it would look cool. Did you use a vehicle from the CD or did you model that as well. I really like this one I keep coming back to it. I think it is very clean.

Awesome look. is there an animation associated with it? That is the impression I got from reading your initial post. Love to see that. Wade

Very impressive. I noticed that they didn't even have the ejection port open in the before shot and it looks like you had to model all of that as well. Or are we seeing two different takes? Very nicely done. Wade

Gotcha on the Transparency. I didn't put that together. I did a google and yahoo image search for feathers. I got one image from one and one from the other. I cleaned them up in Photoshop to make sure that the background was true black for the transparency and saved them out as targas. I used a sprite emitter using three images (one each of the two I found and one of them rotated 90 degrees to ensure some variance in the rotation beyond the natural variance.) The rest is merely (and I say this half jokingly since I only just learned how to adjust the advanced emitter properties over time...thanks David) adjusting the opacity and emission rate over time. It was a nice effect. Thanks, Wade

I was playing around with feathers and sprite emitters for something I am working on and thought this was pretty sweet. So I am posting it. I could not get the emitter itself to not render. It is turned off and does not show in the Chor but no matter how I rendered it, it would always be there. Oh well Feathers.mov

These characters are AWESOME!!! Wade

I'm game. I would like to do it here in Chattavegas. Wade

I do not have any knowledge of long renders except for what I have read or been told. However, when rendering something as long as it sounds like yours is, (60 Hours) you may run into memory problems. That is of course unless you are rendering into tgas expecting to composite later. I believe it has to reserve ram for every frame rendered until it is finallized or something like that. Therefore you will run out of ram before the movie is complete. Someone that knows more needs to explain this better. But of course, you are probably rendering the tgas and don't need my input. Wade

On the bottom one, even though the obvious 'layers' disappear in the depression (lake?), it also seems like some of the details get washed out in the walls. So which is better? It almost looks like a combination might be better. I would imagine that the more steeply the surface is displaced, the more evident the 'washout' will become. Will, if you get to this post before tomorrow evening, I am coming to see you. I am about to upgrade but it will be a couple of weeks. I want to see all the new stuff. Wade

I am sure some peeps are gonna reply and tell you to reduce the spline count almost everywhere. I am not going to do that. Mainly cause I have never modelled a human head. I think it looks fantastic and cannot wait to see the rest. Wade

It looks like the absolute bulk of your 22K plus patches are in the rivots/bolts/nuts. take those out and it looks like you might be left with about 1K If I could first produce a model and second render said model to produce even half of that result, I would consider myself a success. Beautiful, Wade

I did not know that tab will cycle through cp's. Amazing what can be learned trolling these boards. I agree with Ken though. I will some times have an unusual undo. I have learned for the most part when to use and when not to use it but when it does happen, I redo and then manually backup. Wade

Maybe a little known fact but if you open the options and change the units and the grid settings at the same time, the grid setting won't work. It will default the grid setting to whatever it was before. In other words, if you were in CM and the grid was set to xCM, if you change the units to inches and the setting to 12, once you hit okay, only the units will change. The setting will change to whatever xCM would be in inches. I always have to change the units, hit okay, and then go back into options to change the actual grid setting. Wade

If it's for a game, can't the bridge detail be a second model. I would assume it would be a 'level'of it's own and would free up patch count for the model itself. For the problem of being able to see the bridge from outside, could you just decal it to get the detail since there will be no interaction unless you actually enter. Just curious, I think it looks great. Wade

It is a packaging area. The Brown tables in the foreground hold sheets of foam which have been slit from a block of foam. The slitting process currently is not shown. I will be modelling that area as well. The sheets are then pressed individually on the die press (the machine with the yellow guards). The gray stacks on the ball transfer tables and the first table represent pressed material. Packers at each of the six packing stations remove the foam from the sheets for inspection and subsequent packing. It is an extremely labor intensive operation. The 'before' operation was layed out in a pattern that made this labor intensive job even more complicated. This layout has improved the process flow considerably and allowed me to increase the throughput from approx. 850 parts per man-hour to over 1000 PPMH and allowed me to reduce my workforce by 4 operators. There is another change that I have been pushing for the last several years which involves the purchase of another type of press that will allow me to reduce my workforce from 17 employees to 4 employees. I hope to be able to use this as a way to demonstrate both the increase in process flow from then to now as well as show the possibilities in the future. I have also attached a new render with more equipment added as well as some corrected spacing along the right wall. Wade

Haven't posted a new project in a long time. This is what I am currently working on. It is a scale layout of one of the workcenters where I work. I made some significant layout changes in this area about 4 months ago and I wanted to be able to demonstrate the differences. Taking pictures was not doing the trick. This is the new layout. All of the components are the same for the old layout it was just different. A couple of notes: Nothing is bevelled. I do not intend to get much closer than what is shown in this shot so I didn't want to waste the time modelling and subsequently rendering bevelled parts. As a result, all of the various components are extremely primitive. Some of the edges are lost due to the lack of bevels but there is so much going on in the frame that the eye is constantly drawn to other things and this loss of edges will go unnoticed by the majority of peeps that may see it. My lighting sucks. I have not put in a skylight because I want relatively quick renders for testing. This results in some crazy shadows all over the place. I am going to rely heavily on Will to get me through the lighting. He just doesn't know it yet. This is incomplete. There are quite a few more details to add but I wanted to put this up at least. It is about a weeks worth of work at several hours a day. Keepeing everything to scale has been the challenge cause I find myself having to make sketches and measuring everything 2 or 3 times before it all comes together. When I am done with all of the components, I am going to render them all out in ISO and drop them in Multimedia Fusion to see if I can come up with an interactive program. This is going to require people which I have never attempted to model before. Man am I lucky I live so close to Will Sutton. You should all be super jealous. Comments? Wade