I just realized my language might not have been clear enough, lol English language. When I say wider, I actually mean left to right width, if that's not what you thought I meant.

I remember a story that Alfonso Cuaron told in behind the scenes material for Harry Potter and the Prison of Azkaban. If you've ever heard Alfonso talk, you know he has a very thick Mexican accent, but is completely fluent in English. While they were making the film, everyone thought he was a genius because of something he wanted to do with the dementors, in the scene where they try to get Harry on the train. He told them how he wanted "eyes" on the dementors, and everyone thought that was really surreal and cool. So, they did some mock up drawings with all these eyes around the dementors. He then says that he felt bad, because everyone thought he was a genius, and didn't want to tell them that what he really meant was "ice". In the final scene as the dementors get close to the train and near the compartment Harry is in the glass freezes. Pretty funny stuff, and it makes us realize how important language is to getting people to understand exactly what we mean.

In audio, which way to move something is a frequent error in communication, meaning moving something frames sooner or later. I have had multiple times where the client and I were talking a completely different language. When I realize that, I say "to the left or the right?" and then it's figured out. I felt like you might have been thinking I wanted his mouth open wider, like at the dentist.

I think the problem is on my end, I wasn't clear enough. I got what you meant and I agree. In the final image his mouth will be both wider and, well wider the other way as well lol.

Herbivorous dinosaurs' mouths go about 180 around their head, like my clay model's, and I think that my image should be closer to that to make it more anatomically correct and, as you say, give him more expression.

I can see how me saying 'since the final image will have his mouth wide open ' isn't so much confusing as it is downright misleading hehe.

Hahaha, I can't wait to see the next version.

Due to me getting a phone call from my clients wanting what will hopefully be the last piece of work I ever do for them I didn't get the text done today but I will do it tomorrow. I do have something to write about but I'll do it in the morning.

Apologies for the lack of updates. The short answer is I was setting up my new PC (everything worked first time, successkid.jpg). The long answer is long and uninteresting, involves some phone calls, non-existent graphics cards and a lot of cables and boxes.

Anyway, on Wednesday I was reading a tutorial in an issue of 3D artist on how to model a crater lake in zbrush (a sculpting tool) and Vue (an environment tool thingy). Vue makes it quick and easy to generate great looking spectacular environments so I've been looking for an excuse to learn how to use it for a while and I really like modeling in zbrush so the tutorial caught my imagination.

In the tutorial they made a nice, but quite normal lake. I wanted to go for something a little different, a sort of purple, cloudy, soft fantasy world.



In the tutorial there was just a lake, so your eye was just drawn to the water. I want to make it more interesting so in the top left I drew a unicorn standing over the lake.

Then I decided I wanted the unicorn to be part of the lake so top right I put him in the water.

I realized that it wouldn't really work in its current perspective so I brought the camera down and around to face the unicorn (suggestions for his name are welcome btw). I opened up the lake at the back to have a river flowing into it.

I still thought it was a bit boring so bottom right I added a water fall and trees and rocks.


Next I scanned this in and added a better unicorn head:




Now working in digital I made a bigger waterfall that disappeared into the clouds to give the scene a better sense of... epicness.




I realized that I wanted there to be space behind the unicorn so that light could come through and backlight him so I replaced the one waterfall with two to the side.




I realized, if I'm creating a fantasy world, there's no reason I can't have a central waterfall and light coming through the center. Let's just pretend that, like the tepuis in the amazon, the arch is massive enough to make its own weather.




I was fixing a crack in my desk with epoxy putty but again I rolled too much so I made this.




I won't be making a clay model for this project (which I'm dubbing 'Unicorn Hot Tub') but I will be painting a digital painting.

I'll sculpt the terrain in zbrush then add foliage, textures, waterfalls etc in Vue. The unicorn I'll also do in zbrush, probably using the 'shave and a haircut' plugin which is the most popular plugin for hair and fur. It's important I master fur for an animation project I am embarking on.

Because of aforementioned project this will be a low priority thing. I probably won't do any more work on it until after I've finished Larry and when I have, the other project will come first so I might only spend an average of about 4 hours a week on this.

Anyways, later today I'll do the 3D text for Larry and then I'll be ready to move on to the main image.

I finished the 3D text. I'll do the write up tomorrow.

I seem to have fallen into a rhythm where for the first x hours in the day I do light tasks and then slowly get into doing actual work and then I don't stop until after I should have gone to sleep.

So, the 3D text.

First I started off by going through lots of fonts and looking for ones that might be suitable and then I used the text tool in modo to find one that was suitable. Once I had found one I extruded it to make it 3D.




However I found that, because of the way modo makes the topology of its text and because of what I wanted to do to it I would probably be better off just modeling the letters individually so I started with a cube and then extruded one face right and one face up to give me an L shape.



I added some more edge loops to give me some polygons to play with. I wanted the text to have a sort of outline so I duplicated the mesh, scaled it up a bit and then pushed all of the front faces that weren't at the edge so that this new mesh would be visible at the edge and the old one would be visible at the centre. I added materials so I could see how it was looking:



I played with the shape of both pieces of the L to give it a more 3D, softer appearance:




After spending a while tweaking the L I moved on to the other letters. The A and the R were harder as they are more complex.




For the Y I was able to just adapt the L rather than start from scratch, it saved me about half an hour.




Here the text is rendering:




I did two different versions, one with the colors as you see above and one with them the other way around. I wasn't quite happy with either of them, I thought they looked too flat so I duplicated all of it and moved the duplicates so they would cast interesting shadows on the original.




In photoshop I produced 3 different versions of the poster. One each for the different types of 3D text and one with plain text. Last night I definitely preferred the plain text one although this morning the 3D text didn't look as bad as I remembered, lol.I forgot that it's a rule of typography that you've got to keep it simple and if you do use dynamic typography then it should be the focus of whatever you're producing, like the Shrek 2 marketing campaign that featured a big green 2 with shrek ears.







I also created a smaller version, partially just for lols:



If I was doing this again (and I'm not going to, hehe) then I would definitely go a different way about it but the results are ok, I think. Not amazing, but ok. It was mostly just a bonus add on thing anyway.

Suggestions for a better tagline are welcome!

Tagline:

As Angry As He Wants To Be

I love the Larry letters in the 3D version. The framing seems really weird to me of the rest of it, and I don't really dig the white text or the font. Is there a way to give the dinosaur more of a 3D feel, by moving him over to the left, and angling him so that he feels like he is almost coming through the poster? I don't know how hard that is, maybe I just gave you a change that costs a million dollars, and 30 hours of render time...lol. Just to make sure you understand what I mean, he should probably tilt to his right about 45 degrees, you'll know when it's right, and then he should pitch forward a bit, if you like the idea, want to try it, and it's not hard to execute.

Something else maybe to think about is that, in the context of the poster, he actually comes across looking more like clay on his forehead area (or rubber, not really sure what I'm describing). If anything, I'm thinking maybe he should look glossy or glossier? Does that make any kind of sense? I'd really like to see his "weight" look like what you did with the Larry letters, as I think those have an awesome weight.

Please let me know if anything I said doesn't make sense. It's coming along really nicely, and I'm looking forward to you getting down to some real work.

I'm working on the changes now. The most I could really tilt his head without it looking a little odd was 5 degrees. I think to get more I'd actually have to rig the model and then bend his neck down, which the model isn't set up for, I don't know how to do (yet!) and would take quite a while. Also because he's a herbivorous dinosaur nature didn't really design him to have an attack position like a raptor, the head is just the wrong shape so I don't think putting it in that position has the same effect as it might do with a different dinosaur but I think it could still be an improvement.

The only way I could make him more shiny was by adjusting the light. It's rendering now, as I was doing it I was wondering why it wouldn't go shinier but now in occurs to me that the surface simply has nothing to reflect, unlike the area around his eyebrows, so I'll see what I can do about that.


Yes, I'm testing things out now and the lack of something to reflect was indeed the problem. I'm going through the presets now trying to find something suitable but real world presets are too detailed for Larry's cartoon world.. I might have to make my own HDR map if I can't find anything. That will be an, er, adventure.

They came up with a new process for the movie Tangled. Surely you can do the same.

Maybe the effect you would need is something similar to the green around the lettering for Larry. Would that change Larry's look too much?

Were you able to at least move him over to his right some? He seems off kilter in the frame to me, but that may be due to the way the typeface is set.

Although I like things that have cartoon outlines and cel shading I don't think it will work wiht Larry (and I'm not even sure modo has an outlining feature like in Maya so it would be a nightmare to implement.

Yeah, he's head on to the camera now so if nothing else it should now be balanced. I guess the answer to what is causing him to look off kilter lies in the question 'does he look off kilter in the text-less image?'. I think maybe he could do with being moved slightly, but I think the text unbalances it more.

My third attempt is rendering now and then I'm going to do one with different colors out of a sense of curiosity. This time I will write it up before going to bed.

For the full image I'll be transitioning to my new PC which should make all this a lot faster. Right now I'm having to wait 15 minutes for each attempt to render, adding the HDR tripled the render time.

Although this new version will hopefully look better on a poster I think I prefer the original for an avatar hehe, I've been meaning to change for a while.

Ok, so I moved the camera around and down to be head on with Larry and then rotated him down 5 degrees. I moved the light downwards to be shining up at Larry and again, to be head on as I found the shadows to be unbalancing when the camera was head on.



I still wasn't getting that much reflection off his head so I added a HDR map. The one I settled on in the end was, unsurprisingly, a desert scape. Whenever the paint/draw/render metal they always say to reflect a desert scape in it (unless of course you have an environment to reflect in it) because it looks natural.



So here the poster is with the desert scape and text applied. I centered the text to fit in with the rest.



After discovering the new reflection opportunities afforded to me by the HDR I had fun playing with reflections:



It's probably a bit too much but I'll be able to judge better when I've slept on it.

Here's a not so shiny final version



Then for fun I decided to make a blue Larry, and I changed the background and text to match:



Again it's probably a bit too much, I toned it down a bit:




Right now I'm not sure which version I prefer.

I may or may not start work on the main image tomorrow. I'm not sure yet, there are some other things I'd like to do.

I actually love this one, because it makes you do a double take to look to see exactly what it is. That wasn't really what I had in mind for his head angle, but it actually looks really cool in a kind of slightly scary way...lol. You could actually stylize other posters, and have him be in profile looking like he's saying some kind of angry phrase, off to one side or the other in the frame, and then put text across from his mouth. You know, something like "If I want your opinion I'll ask for it." It could almost be like a meme, in a way.

It looks like the white text at the bottom needs to be lower in the frame, as it's nearing his "chin", and it would be nice if you could make it pop more, like how the Larry stuff pops. Right now, it sort of looks like you typed text over an image, as opposed to creating something more along the lines of a graphic. If you get that text issue fixed, I think you have something really cool, and all you'd need to do is tweak it to your liking after that. It's the poster for the "movie", so it should look really cool and make people want to see the movie, even though you're treating it as a bonus, which is cool for us.

It's awesome seeing you putting stuff together.

I looked at the white text in larger detail, and it actually looks really good, in large closeup. It literally just needs something that makes it pop more in these smaller photos. The text actually looks nice, though, as I said, the bottom text looks a little close to his chin.

I love them all! Hes so pissed off and it makes me giggle




This one is currently winning for me, but I change my mind frequently



Also we need to get to the next page ASAP. This thread takes my comp like 2 mins to open lol