Anim8or Community

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Mainly all Dr Who-related animations.  Check out the walk cycle on my latest cyberman render.

Yay!  I see Daleks here! Good taste, Audrey2!

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Well I was a bit bored this evening, so I thought I'd have a go at a decent head model - a few hours' work so far, and a decent UV texture hides a multitude of sins.  Mostly "drawn" in point editing mode, with some use of the extrusion tool too.  It's based on William Hartnell, the first actor to play Dr. Who (that show's something of a recurring theme in my stuff...)

I think the nose is terrible at the moment - I've completely re-done it once already.

I started from one eyelid, bilding a spline, filling it, then drawing outwards in point edit mode, filling in facets, building down towards the mouth, then mirrorred this mesh, joined the two sides, moved points in the Z direction to give depth, kept on slicing and moving points, used a bit of extrusion around the nostrils.  The ears were modelled seperately, still need a bit of jiggery-pokery.  UV mapped on some textures.  The hair is a modified sphere shape - a bit basic but looks the part.

The textures are all photoshop jobs - the skin is taken from an actual photo, the eyes and hair are painted with various PS tricks & filters.  The hair has two layers - the outer has a transparency map to give the hair some depth.




by way of a comparison, here's some photos:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/gallery/firstdoctor/index.shtml

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They're cybermats - little robot rodent things the Cybermen used in the 1960s serials. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_the_cybermen)

Rendering, is, sadly, always a tradeoff between time and quality.  By rendering at higher res, you can hide jaggies, and indeed hide low samples in anti-alias.  Anti-alias is, though, a necessity if you want soft shadows...

I'm also in the habbit of rendering big as I've done a few images of late that were for panning across in 2d animations.

The green-ness is a simple local light, behind them, hidden by fog.  It's amazing what you can achieve with a simple lighting trick that all the photoshop in the world wouldn't be able to do!

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That is very atmospheric - very good texturing, just needs less ambient.

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You could add a reference image of a circle as a guide to selecting points - use a lower resolution grid & convert it to a subdivision, too.

Perhaps Terranim8or's facility to create a terrain from a height map might do the trick.

If it just has to look like a wireframe, you could always just lathe the shape then UV map a grid texture over it..

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaball

Why what does Metaball mean?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaball

I've had a go on it with an antiquated version of truespace - everything looks like the insides of a lava lamp though 

I am about to make a model and I was wondering what the best type of modeling would be. I have heard of box modeling, edge extruding, metaballs, and more. I was wondering how to do edge extrusion and metaballs but mainly edge also which would be the best?

It depends what you're modelling.  use a bit of whatever makes the shapes look right - extrude, distort, spline, lathe away - then use point mode to get the finer proportions right.  For Organic shapes convert to subdivision.

My Philosophy:  Point mode solves most of life's problems.  For everything else there's throwing the computer out of the window and going to the pub.

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