Roger

I closed off the back of the eye sockets, added sphere primitives for the actual eyeballs and then did a half sphere for the lids. I think it looks fairly decent, so I'll probably go that route with the penguin but add some long eyelashes. This is starting to look fairly decent.

Ok so I have added some patches to the upper part of the snout. I'm more or less satisfied with the way this is looking. However, I'm not sure how I'm going to do an eyelid. I've thought about using a half sphere for the eyelid but not sure how thta is going to look. Maybe I would be better off with a different style eye?

That's a good idea, I'll give that a try.

I just added another patch to the top half of the front of the snout, but I still have 3 point patches. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get around that. How do you go about adjusting bias? There is alpha, gamma and in and out magnitude. I'm not really sure what I should be adjusting.

Yeah, I caught that and fixed it already. I'm getting some weird looks on the snout, though. Almost as if the points are peaked, but they're not. Do you have any suggestions for how to deal with eyes and eyelids on this model? I've got the eye sockets in but I think I'm going to have a tough time getting the eyes to look right.

Well I definitely think this one looks better than the other. I have a much more pleasing look to the corner of the mouth, even if it is not perfect. I think I may be able to redue the detail on the front of the snout a bit. The inside of the mouth wasn't as bad as I thought it would be to do.

Well, I have a rough mouth splined in so far but it has me wondering if maybe it goes back a bit too far? Also, the corner of the mouth is really bad right now and I'm not quite sure what todo to fix it. I think the mouth might look better if the hinge point of the jaw is moved up another patch, but I'm still left with the problem of how to make that corner look natural.

So after having some time away from my experiment at an alternate dragon, I've decided it is pretty awful. I'm going ahead with my original model but making a few tweaks to it. I am going to try to have some kind of mouth for him, since in my mind it doesn't make much sense for him to have no mouth. I'm posting a screengrab of the spline I'm going to add to create an upper and lower jaw, and I'm also thinking about putting some nostrils in. I will have to experiment to see where they look best.

Yeah, no mine has to have arms, it's important to the story that he be able to grasp things. I think I just need to make a few subtle changes to my existing model, rather than re-work the whole thing. I'm not happy with the revision I did yesterday, that is for sure.

Yeah, I really hadn't seen him as being a quadruped. In my storyboard sketches he is able to stand and walk upright. Although originally he did have quad legs and regular arms.

It doesn't need to, but it is bipedal, the legs are jointed like a person's legs are. So I figure the expectation will be it should walk like a person. I could do a stiff-legged robot walk, but that would look odd (unless he was pretending to be a robot). I'm going to have to experiment with some walks and see what looks best.

Here is with the head. Again, I'm not sure I'm going the right direction with this. It is a simpler character, though.

Here is another take on my dragon, so far. I don't have the hands, feet or head modeled yet, but I'm getting better at modeling quickly, anyway. This took me about an hour to do, compared to a week to knock out the first (very) rough version. I'm not sure how productive, this is though. Even though I'm trying to create a more limited look I seem to keep coming back to the same general body shape.

Here is the more or less completed chest. I've adjusted the spacing on the planks that make up the chest bottom, but there still seems to be something missing. Guess I need to make a latch for the padlock to dangle from. I'm not sure how much I like the metal parts that keep the slats which make up the top together, but given that this chest is going to have a clay shader applied to it I'm not sure how much sense it makes to stress about them.

Ok, I just checked it, hopefully that should fix it. What is OpenMP btw? Something to do with multiprocessing?

That is cute. I haven't decided if I'm going to significantly modify my dragon or not. It will mean throwing out a lot of work if I do, BUT might make him easier to animate. Or at least reduce expectations that it should move like a person. Having something I can animate rapidly is going to be critical in being able to finish this in the time frame I've allotted myself. My penguin char is already fairly simple, I just need to add some finishing touches.

Thanks, I'll check that.

When choosing File > Save Project As, shouldn't you get a field for the name, in case you want to update the name or change it in some way? I don't have that, and I'm pretty sure it's something I used to have.

Ok, here is the chest top more or less finished. The spacing between the slats is just a hair too much, but I'm really loathe to go back and adjust this now, because it was a real pain in the butt doing it the first time. I'm sure something will be completely off if I do it, so it may just have to be that way for now. One solution might be to make another semi-cylinder that would nest inside and block the view of the interior. I do plan on adjusting the other slats, just not these.

So I fixed the rail going around the outside of the top of the chest, and closed it off. I think it looks much better now.

I'm thinking about tweaking the body of my dragon for limited animation. Right now he looks awfully humanoid, the audience is going to expect him to move like a person. If I simplify the character a bit, perhaps I can "cute" him up a bit and also eliminate that expectation of realistic human motion. I am thinking about simple tubes for the arms and legs, sort of how a teddy bear has very simple limbs. Maybe just a suggestion of stubby toes or fingers. Shorter neck, larger head. I have just sort of jammed the legs in there for now until I can figure out how to attach them.

Ok, that's odd, I thought I posted it.

Yeah, I just wanted to have them in the same modeling window. I just cut and paste the one into the other, seemed like the easiest way to go about doing it. Just wondered if there was a better way.

Ok, so here is a nearly completed treasure chest. Some of the things that are bothering me are: the metal banding on the corner doesn't match that going around the planks on the top, I'll need to resize one or the other so it does. I need to come up with some sort of latch for the padlock to hang off of, it looks odd just attached to the chest like that. I need to think about moving the boards closer together so that the cracks aren't quite so wide. Handles are in the wrong position and should maybe be closer to the top? I'm also thinking about redoing the handles. I may need to scale the boards that make up the bottom half, so that there are more and they more closely match the top half in size. Something just looks off about it. And I still need to add rivets on the metal parts. But I think I have maybe one or two more nights of solid work on this and it will be done.

I have both the models for my treasure chest in the same project file, they both show up in the PWS. However, they're in separate windows and I'm not sure how to combine them into the same window, other than using cut and paste or exporting a model and then reimporting it into whichever window I choose to be the active one. Is this how it's done or is there something obvious I'm missing?