Turkey Day, and what became of it

So, I had to work over this morning/night, so I had plenty of time to work on modeling. Muuuch thanks to the guy who decided that he just didn't feel like working today. Anyhow, I found an outhouse on my screen by the end of the day. Quite fitting to the mood of the day, don't you think?

And now for something completely different

I tried to start learning 3d max last night - mistake. No nap before work so I was already tired, and reading tutorial after tutorial about the basic functions of the program, I felt a little tired. So, to wake myself up, and not lose my job, I decided to reuse the previous model. So, now you can see what the character I made has in his daily diet.

Mudman - now "Sewer Patrol" Finished!

I finished it, finally. I had to render the background in Bryce, and then put it into Poser, as even DAZ's utility didn't want to allow me to put the object file into Bryce correctly. It kept rendering poorly. Anyhoo, it's up on the site now, and on this blog, of course. I'm really proud of it, as everything but the Poser character itself was made from scratch! The grenades, the giant pipe, the junk in the background, the radio (kinda hard to see from this angle, I admit), the belt packs, all made from scratch. Enjoy!

Horshoes and Hand Grenades

No horsehoes actually. But I'z Gotz Hand Grenadz!! And an ammo pack of sorts. More models for the Poser mudman figure I've been working on. I have another that I made the other day, but I'll post that later. Oh, and the camoflauge was made using both a free plugin at www.vanderlee.com and the pixelation-mosaic filter. I'm using it as a texture for my character's pants. Tell me what you think!

Low Polys - difficult.... I think so

So I'm making progress on the cartoon head, it's looking a little more refined. I'm also learning how to use Milkshape to add and remove faces at will. So far, the head only has 138 polys. I could probably go lower, but I think I may go a bit higher so I can smooth some parts out, plus going lower requires a LOT more experimentation and tweaking than what I ever imagined.

Graarrrgh

Alas I have failed to obey the tenants of computer law, for I did not save often. I had my Poser figure almost shaped and posed, and then it crashed, and I realized that after 3 hours of working on it, I hadn't saved. And thus after another 10 minutes of quickly redoing some of what I had done previously, I went to other activities again for awhile. No pics, but I started working on making my own character. Creating a cartoon, low-poly head is harder than I thought, and is definitely a learning experience. In completely randomness, I started reading the new Wheel of Time novel, the first in almost a decade! So the road to learning may become a small bit longer.

Textures, models and headaches

Ah... so I made a higher res texture for the arm cannon... then I ran into a snag. I have to read a little on how to extract UV maps from Poser figures. I can't put conforming clothing on my mudman figure because he's so big, so I have to paint the clothing on the figure... which also means having to resculpt the figure (easy part) but it also means I have to paint the clothing (hard part) as I don't have a UV map (flattened wireframe) to give me the contours, I will have to guess and check if my clothing is hitting the right areas and if it's seamless, etc. etc. Not something I look forward to, so I'm gonna do a little research. In the meantime, I worked on an AK-47 Romanian variant, similar to the one I own in real life, and as I said before, here's the hires arm cannon. As for the AK-47... a better texture might be a good thing...

3d - I feel learned

I'm learning... I think. I'll probably redo the gun textures as I don't think they look realistic enough - plus the one pic texture is only 256x256. The sword texture was kind of fun, as I learned a quick and dirty way of making a realistic damascus steel kind of look. Han Wei eat your heart out!!! (Ok, so it's EXTREME low poly but it was my first drawn-vertex model, and I like how it turned out)

3d modeling

I'm currently working on learning 3d modeling, rather than using solely Poser and the like. I don't have a 3 button mouse yet, so I've been learning Milkshape 3d for basic modeling.





If you read this, leave a comment on what you think of my Mudman WIP thus far (BTW, the gun is being replaced w/ the other)