Gerry

here's two quick suggestions for an ending pose. The one with the fist down needs something more with the other hand I think. Anyway, just a couple of ideas that I hope will help you think this through. Gerry

The asymmetrical arm movements muddy the emphasis on his words. Maybe both arms outstretched, palms up on "wonderful". I'll try to post a sketch of what I mean. EDIT: or maybe if you want to keep the fist in, more of an emphatic downward "by golly!" move with it. This is a nice little piece and a good start!

Ben, are the walls and ceiling a material or did you paint in photoshop? Also, for textures in case you don't already have it, try http://www.mayang.com/textures/ Hope you get that radiosity working. Gerry

This is all looking great! I haven't checked in on this thread in a month or so and the progress is really impressive. It's great to see a solid idea carried through with such style and thoroughness.

Here's two images of Santa's wireframe, bare face and with all the details. The animation will have only a closeup reaction shot or two, but i want to be able to rig it right so there are no (or very few!) surprises when I get to animating. Any comments on these are appreciated!

Still tweaking, and combined the snail and sleigh into one model. I've tried a ton of different materials for the snail shell and it's still not final but I think I like this one for now. The snail will be decorated with lights etc so the hopefully the focus will not be on the shell itself.

Well, no, but as you'll see that's kind of the point.

Some progress on the snail.

Here's a quick test with the major elements in place and a little body movement from Santa. I busted my butt creating a material for the snail shell, and a coworker came by and said why not make it striped like a candy cane? D'oh!! So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm also figuring out how best to rig the snail for movement. Believe it or not on YouTube there are movies of snail movement! The Santa model also needs some additional rigging in the shoulders and face, and I still haven't added his eyebrows. Mouth needs some work too. I'll try to post a closeup of his wireframe as I think there will be at least one closeup reaction shot of Santa, and I would like some feedback on maximizing his face for animation. SleighSantaandSnail_v2.mov

Really nice piece, and everyone's comments, especially Mark and William, are great food for thought. Always helpful to read this kind of crit.

Here's a beauty shot of Santa's sleigh. I think I'm finished with the detailing, though I may come back to it. I'd like to do something more interesting with the fabric of the sack. But for now, it's on to...the snail! Sleigh_beautyshot_rotate_v2.mov

Hey Dhar, I just clicked over to your link from the 11-second club and it cracked me up! Good work!

Thanks! Not to give too much away, but I'll be introducing a new holiday symbol, the Christmas Snail.

I'm working on my employer's animated company greeting again and I'll be posting some renders here as I progress. Thus far I've taken the Santa Lion model from the cd and made him into a "real" Santa, and modeled his sled and bag of presents. here's a still. I'm still detailing things but I wanted to get something up here to get a thread started. More later! Gerry

Yardie- That's all good advice. It's very helpful to see it all written down plainly and matter of factly. Thanks for that!

I've got a new problem with a transparency decal. We want to turn sections of the laptop transparent to see the drives inside. I created a transparency map and that part works fine. But when I want to make the decal "disappear", making the laptop opaque again, in the chor I set the percentage to 0% and the patches with the decal turn completely transparent. Any helpful suggestions are appreciated! In an effort to effect this, I tried changing the "type" to "other...", and then lost the "type" option altogether. I can reapply it I guess. but is there a way to get the "type"option back?

Thanks for responding guys. I don't know what it was, Luuk, you may be on to something about restarting. the first QT movie I brought in showed the frame option, but it didn't seem to have any effect. Thereafter, when I deleted the QT and brought in other formats (.avi, tga sequence) I couldn't seem to find the frame option. Well, it WAS late and I've been putting in 17-hour days on this project. Anyway I was wondering if it was because the movie was too compressed (h.264 codec), but in any case I did get some help from a local friend who also works in AM and he walked me through it. With his help I got the .tga sequence to work just fine. I came to a stopping point today and experimented with other compressions to see what works and a Sorenson3 version did just fine. We are creating a video tutorial on storage media for a patent case and at this point we're just creating a series of stills for a storyboard, which will later be turned into full animation with voice over. Here's one still.

I'm trying to decal a movie or image sequence onto a laptop screen and it's just misbehaving like crazy. I'm on v13q. I've done this before and though it took some trial and error I did get it to work. But that was a few years ago. I've tried a QT movie and I couldn't get it off the first frame. I'm trying a sequence of .tga files but I got an error message, though it seems to be behaving otherwise. Any help, or anyone pointing me to a help file or thread would be much appreciated! Gerry

Nice John, post your re-render when you can. Slowing it down a bit will help.

Strange but interesting, John. At the end it looks like some mutant creature trying to emerge from the fragments. Nice work!

Nice work John. It's inspiring to see these purely experimental projects.

I think the table texture is good, but as you darken all the other colors, it's looking a little orange. Keep the texture but adjust the colors to tone it back a bit.

Okay, that's just weird...interesting but weird.

Try something like this with the couch...

Couch!