Darkwing

Ooh, have the first pic, but not the second. And I'm drawing from a bunch of ref pics. But yeah, that forward jaw bit needs more to it

And here's just a tad more

Yeah, though I'm gonna make it a bit of a mix of the Mark V and VI suit, as I didn't really like the dull look of the Mark VI, so I'm gonna give it some better colours and that Halo Reach style shine. So yeah, won't be completely accurate, but should be pretty cool

Yep, I've started picking away at another side model, just to keep things interesting, so I figured that I might as well take a stab at a character from pretty much the only video game I play and that would be Master Chief. It seems others have started models of the Chief, but I can find no record of anyone finishing, so let's hope I can finish this one at some point! Now, something I have learned very early on, this model is kinda tricky, lots of weird placements for shapes and stuff, but yeah

Well still, it's quite impressive, it really has that sports feel and I love the use of reflections and shiny objects

Very impressive! Was it all done with AM, flames and all?

Believe it or not, pretty much all of the textures were created by a free vector program called Inkscape. I only used Photoshop for 2 elements I think

Seems I've forgotten to update this thread! The model is nearing its completion as there's not much left to texture or light on this ship. These pics are not in order of completion

Dang, you work fast!

Yeah...that's basically what I was saying. Like I said, if it's a progressive scan DVD, than that pretty much means it's a 24p DVD and well, pretty much every DVD released in the last 5 or more years has been progressive scan

by George I think I got it! So Pinnacle didn't have an option for the project to be in 24FPS, however, it does have a "set from first clip added. So I added one that I just rendered at 24FPS (shoulda exported to 23.978 or whatever for better results) and low and behold, when I checked the project settings, they were at 25FPS (thus why I should have exported to 23.978) and then I just burn the DVD at 100% quality (according to the program says the disk will have 70 minutes, but it's been known to miscalculate) so it looks like in theory I can do it!

Oh and an interesting tidbit, apparently authoring to BD-R is somewhat easier as BD-R is more native to 24fps than DVD. It seems that most BD-R encoding software offers the option of 24fps (among others) however I have neither the software or the hardware to do BD authoring

Well, see it seems that the problem resides in the fact that not all DVD players are progressive scan. From what I can tell, Progressive scan is generally the 24fps format, however, most TVs receive the signal at 30fps (aside from Plasma TVs and a few others out there). Now to do this, the 24fps DVD needs to do something known as 3:2 pulldown explained here which apparently is the best way of doing this conversion of 24fps to 30fps as like I said, pretty much all TVs play in the 30fps format. The main reason then for encoding in 24fps is simply to maximize disk space. Now our problem of burning a 30fps disk, is the conversion process happens before it's burned and depending on the method, quality is lost or frames jitter, also, we then lose the benefit of those playing the DVD on a 24fps television (in which there is a minor quality improvement if encoded in 24fps). Now for us, our ideal situation probably would've been to render in 30fps in the first place, joys of digital animation is we can control our raw footage However, getting everyone to re-render is absurd, especially if some of them were intensive renders. Now from what I can tell, I can encode the final video in 24fps, however, I would then have no method of creating a DVD menu. See if I encode the footage in 24fps, I can simply drag and drop onto the disk as if it were a simple data disk and so we'd skip the DVD encoding stage in which it would convert the footage to 30fps. Downside is no menu and less compatibility with players because then we'd have to choose a format such as MPEG2 and there's still a bunch of players in circulation that don't read that kind of file format. On top of that, the DVD player wouldn't do the 3:2 pulldown so the player would most likely skip or have some form of archiving occur. I haven't tried my idea with Pinnacle yet, because I'm pretty sure it has a Progressive scan option which might do the trick for us, so I'll keep you updated on my findings.

Wow, just doing more reading, editing and stuff in 24fps obviously isn't much of a problem, but man, apparently even Adobe Encore doesn't encode 24fps DVDs, but I'm still digging around seeing if I can find something that does. Part of the problem is that most DVD apps that say they encode 24fps don't, they're actually being converted to 29.97fps in the encoding phase via methods you described earlier. But, not giving up, least not yet

Yeah I know about films being 24 fps, y'know, theatre projectionist and all Like I sort of alluded to, I have an idea about something, but I have to go onto the other PC and try some things out cause I *may* have a way of burning 24fps in Pinnacle.

Oh and if you haven't caught it yet, I would kinda like to make a menu considering I don't have anything to contribute to this project and would like to, only problem is if you really need 24fps or not

Well, is there any particular reason it has to be 24fps? I mean the difference between 24 and 30 is barely if not noticeable at all and I'm not sure, but did most people render it in 30fps or 24fps? I've been doing a bit of reading though on authoring 24fps and some suggestions include using Quicktime as a compressor of sorts and to have it all bundled up in a QT file at 24fps and burn the file directly instead of going through a third party app such as iDvd or whatever. But I'm not sure how one would do menus and the like. Like I said before, I've made some fairly advanced menu systems with Pinnacle, but Pinnacle seems to only do 30 fps and not 24. However, hmmm, I did just have an idea which I will explore after watching an MST3K

I expect it yesterday mister! Ha ha, the editing phase, one of my more favourite phases of the overall film production experience. Good luck!

Jaw-droppingly amazing! Fantastic work, looks great so far!

Can't wait to see the whole thing compiled guys!

Thanks guys, I had a wonderful day yesterday

Ha ha, yeah, I'm actually quite pumped to try out this fixed particle thingy!

Thanks Hashers!! Oh yeah, I got some good news too that I just found out, some of you may remember ages ago that I put in a ticket about the particle rendering issues, about transparent objects being visible when emitting particles, well, I thought it was forgotten about or nobody cared or whatever, well, apparently it's been fixed in Beta 5 of V16! So a bug that's been around almost every version of Am to my knowledge may now be resolved, so yay!!! Many reasons to be happy today, yes?

Without having looked, popping I do believe occurs when you make the leg too straight. At it's straightest point, it should still have a slight bend at the knee

Oh and the mesh could probably be even less dense than it is now. The original mesh had a lot of splines, but at the time it was going to be exported for Max and I've learned a denser mesh has a more accurate export, however, texturing proved to be a problem in Max and so it was decided to keep the model in AM and so I removed a bunch of splines, but there's still more that probably could be removed