Roger

That's a good question, been thinking about that. I'll need to search for some reference images, been a long time since I've seen one of their movies. Last one I can remember was the one with the chickens, can't for the life of me think of the name right now. But I do seem to remember there being other materials besides clay, except for the characters, which were all clay.

Here is one of the default wood textures from AM - this actually doesn't look half bad:

I hadn't really thought too much about textures. The original plan was to use the modelled clay shader from the Darktrees. I had also thought about incorporating the colored pencil look from my sketches, but I think everything would have to be rendered that way. While I like it, I think it may be very difficult to get it to look good in 3d given my lack of texture mojo. I had been planning on using modelled clay for just about everything except the water (was going to try for realistic or semi-realistic water) and things that need to be metal or reflective.

Ok, I've got the edges of the board with sort of a scalloped look to them now. I didn't do any adjusting of points along the vertical plane. I think this is starting to come along nicely. I just need some iron strapping to hold it together, and some handles on the side (not sure if I'm going to make a lid for it yet).

Do you mean the top and bottom edges of the board should not be straight, or the actual sides of the board?

Robcat, do you mean increase the number of cross sections that make up the board and then adjust the curvature so its not perfectly straight?

Here is the chest I have been working on but with smaller bevels:

Ok, not sure what happened to my last post. Here is a newer version of the chest with smaller bevels. I haven't bothered capping the ends of the planks, since I figure those are going to be covered up anyway by iron bracing.

Robcat, I did some new panels with smaller bevels. Let me know what you think.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, I've been fighting off pneumonia and haven't been able to do much of anything. I'm hoping to get back on track soon.

Message board is acting strange, moving my image from one post to another.

I'll give that a try and see how it turns out. I don't want to lavish too much time on this one model.

Ok I think I have something that I am starting to like here with the treasure chest made of the individual boards. I still need to make the iron bands to brace the sides and top. Let me know what you think:

I think that buried treasure chests are one of those movie cliches that have been around so long no one really thinks about them. Even covered in tar or something, I can't imagine wood would last too long in the ground.

Yes, it is a treasure chest/pirate chest type thing. I see what you are saying now - model each board separately, then piece it together. I was just modelling the side and bottom panels, but that wasn't working quite like I thought it would. I was planning on using a texture to indicate separate boards. I'll probably need to do nails, too so that it will look like it is actually held together by something. I'll give that a try tonight.

Somehow I ended up with a double-post, not sure how that happened. Here is a screenshot:

Working on the chest again tonight, trying to see if I can get it looking closer to how I want it to look. I have modeled each panel of the chest separately, currently they are just sort of jammed together. I probably need to connect them with splines to the other panels, but not sure of the best way to do that.

Really well done and cute. I like Lothario's look, kinda reminds me of the cowardly lion.

Well, I closed and reopened the project and it is working now. Not sure what happened there.

Ok, I have beveled the chest but I can't really use the same tactic I used last time to cap the ends off - if I try to use a spline to join the two topmost inner points on the end, the spline automatically curves. If I try to peak that spline, it removes the bevel from the area where I want it. There must be a better way to do this. Too bad you can't model a boxy item and then run an "autobevel" or something.

Here is a test rendering of the treasure chest. I used the grid wizard and pulled the points to come up with a large mass of gold, which I will then put maybe a dozen or so coin models on top of (along with jewels, etc). Or would it be better to model one coin, duplicate it 500 times and use Newton physics to dump them in the box? Seems like that would be a lot of overhead to calculate. The gold looks ok (its actually the default brass material from the AM library) but the wood material doesn't look much like wood. I think I'm going to have to experiment with that some more.

Yeah, that reminds me, I have a funny story to tell you about googling for reference images.

I am hitting the "render to screen" button (the one immediately to the left of the render lock button) and am not getting any output to the screen - it renders like it normally does but then never shows the image on the screen. Render lock seems to work normally. Anyone have any ideas what may be going on?

I know it is difficult to tell from that pic, but I did attempt to mimic normal finger length. Part of it is the angle of the pic, and the other part is that while there are differences in finger length, they need to be more pronounced. Here is a screenshot of the tweaks I made. I do think this one looks better but it is still a bit funky.

I think you are right about the cuticle, and the claws probably are too long. I wish I could figure out what it is about the hand that is still bothering me.