'The Pissed off dinosaur' definitely needs to be a different font though.

Thinking about it, ideally I'd like 'The Pissed Off Dinosaur' to be 3D like the Larry text but that would take a long time to implement without actually teaching me anything.

Hmm, not sure how I feel about these. The Pissed Off Dinosaur part doesn't work for me, because now it feels out of context being below the quote. I also think, if possible, you should try center "Larry" for all shots, as it seems weird on the left to me, framing wise. I think there's too much neck in the bottom 2 versions, but the ones with a little less neck seem okay.

I think the biggest issue is the widescreen framing. It doesn't feel right to me. Still, I suggest moving on to the rest of the stuff you are going to do, and re-visit this later. Usually people make posters based on what they've seen, and not a concept. I didn't realize it would be ultra-violent, based on your posts, either. A different concept would be a Larry foot in a blood puddle saying, "Stepping on the competition". It would be much easier to do this sort of stuff, though, if we saw the finished product.

For The Informant!, while the posters make it seem like a comedy, it really wasn't. It was about a delusional guy who you kind of laugh at for how bizarrely he thinks of himself. It was based on a true story about a whistleblower, and his undercover operation.

On these profile ones, I think I just realized what needs to be done with the title. You probably need to have "Larry The Pissed Off Dinosaur" at the bottom, with "Larry" shrunk down, so that it's just a small title in the frame. That might make the profile staging of Larry unattractive, though. That's what I think bugs me, though I'm not 100 percent sure. It actually might work as a left justification, if you make the full movie title very small in the corner on two lines. There, that's my suggestion...lol.

As soon as you said to center the text on all of them I looked at them and realized you are right, lol.

I decided in the shower that I should either have no 'the pissed off dinosuar' ('Larry' is fine as a title anyway, the rest can be considered a subtitle I suppose) at all or have it 3D like the 'Larry'. Since the thought of forming all those letters individually horrifies me I think I'll go for the former.

Arrgh, I hate loading this thread...lol.

If you're just going to go the Larry only route, try to make the "Larry" a small bug in the lower left. I think it will probably make a huge difference in the look, and allow you to go higher with your text, which might be more appealing.

Don't worry, almost on a new page!

I'll give it a go now after the normal versions are done saving. I'll be glad to move to working on my new PC tomorrow, this one isn't cut out for this.

First I centralized the 'Larry' and got rid of the 'pissed off dinosaur' on 4 versions:






Is this what you had in mind for putting the Larry in the corner or do you think it should be ever smaller?




I think I like it. I gave the blue/red one a little more space than the green/orange one.

Right, I'm off to bed now. I'll start work on the main image tomorrow, although I won't be able to do so until the evening.

It should have the left justification of the red and blue one, but it should be really small, like how you see a bug on a TV show of a network, if that makes sense. If it looks too small, just keep re-sizing it until it feels readable enough. Based on how that looks, I actually think you could put "The Pissed Off Dinosaur" below it, and it would still work, as small size. Otherwise, it kind of makes it look like a signature of a painting.

Also, it just gave me another idea for a character poster...lol. If you could make one version that has no text, but has his image mostly filling the entire frame (width wise), with still having the "Larry" title and the top of his head in the same place(the front facing main poster, I mean), I would love to see that. It might not work, and if it takes much time, don't do it. But, it was just an idea.

Oh, and I definitely think the text in the red and blue one (the last image) feels better than the orange and green one.

For the poster size I used all the neck I had, I had to use the subtitle to fill the empty space.




This is the last post on the page and the last work I will do on this image for now! For real this time, lol.

I could produce hundreds of different posters and take it a hundred different ways and maybe I will, but not until the final image is done.

For the basically finished stuff, I think all four of those look really good. My only "notes" would be that the "bugs" in the lower left of the top two should probably move slightly to the left. The other note is that it looks like the back of his neck isn't attached to anything in the bottom 2, so you would probably need to lower the dinosaur to the point where you don't see the edges. You could cover the extra real estate by just making the "Larry The Pissed Off Dinosaur" larger in relation to the added real estate to where it looks mostly the same. Still you're done with the these, for now, and I think you did a really good job attempting to do my changes (sorry for derailing you...lol). You should make one of the bottom 2 your avatar, whichever one your prefer.

Good luck on the next stage!

Apologies for the lack of updates. Whilst I was working for these clients I've not played poker at all (I play for cash more than for fun) but now that that's over I started again on Monday. I just started back at PLO2 lol because ipoker gave me $5 free and I had a bit left on there. I made $9 so not bad. Yesterday and today I went back to PLO20 and made $70 and $80 including rakeback from a combined total of 5 hours work. Obviously it's not a sustainable winrate but I felt like I was playing really well, as if I'd not taken any time off at all, and as soon as my BR is big enough I'll be back playing PLO50 (I can beat it but I've only really played PLO50 on Minted which was soft when they had $1 max rake, I've never really been a PLO50 reg, simply it's a lack of volume that stops me from progressing, why play poker when I could be doing this? hehe).

Also, I think a couple of days off from this helped. In terms of actual careers modeling and post processing would be way down my list below story, writing, directing, animating, art direction etc and after a few solid days working on Larry I was a bit fatigued. Add to that the fact it's been 80 degrees here the last few days and it's been hard to get much done. Obviously 80 degrees is nothing to most Americans but unlike a lot of American houses, British ones generally don't have AC so the heat is unrelenting!

I'll be doing a short update later today. Unlike with the first image I won't wait until I've practically finished it and then do a write up, if I did it might end up having a 5 figure word count, I'll do it in stages.

Oh by the way, I tried both colors of shiny Larry as an avatar but it was hard to tell what it was in 80*80.

So I started work on the main image today.

I started off by creating a long wide cuboid for the ground, making sure that the top of it was at 0 on the y axis to make everything easier.




Next I created a new mesh for Larry's body. In it I created a 1mx1mx1m cube, 20 cm off the ground.




I turned symmetry on in the x axis like last time, then I shifted the polygons in the corners outwards and then down to create legs.




I then shifted out polygons at the front and back for his head and tail:




I started resizing the tail as well as making it more rounded.





Here it's more or less done, with one vertex out of place:




Next I started shaping the body:




As is recommended for ensuring that you maintain good topology I've been working with subdivisions turned off. I briefly explained them last time but since I'm not writing 2900 words now I'll try to do it a bit clearer. Essentially with subdivisions turned on a polygon 'cage' 'drives' a more complex mesh. All this means is is that subdivisions divide up the mesh after-the-fact to make it smoother, without complicating modeling. A subdivision level of 1 divides each polygon into 4. The next level divides each of those into 4 and so on. Obviously going up a level drastically increases the polygon count of the model and so render times. The default level is 2. There's a massive visual different between no subdivisions and level 1 and a big difference between 1 and 2. There's only a small difference between 2 and 3 and even smaller beyond. Now that I have a capable workstation I will probably be going for level 3, anything higher is pointless except in specific circumstances.

Anyway, back to the point. Even though I'm modeling with subdivisions off I turn them on occasionally to see how it looks and check to see if it throws up any weird errors. It's a good thing I did because it did:


This was caused by the way I extruded the polygons because I didn't extrude them, I shifted them and this is me learning just how different those two things are. This was print screened from inside the model looking at the interior walls of the tail:



Apparently for each polygon I shifted, although it kept them all together, it made a new set of polygons adjacent as if I had extruded them separately. For the legs this wasn't a problem since they were one polygon big.

Ah well, lesson learned. It was not a problem, I just had to delete them.

Here the model is after I had done so with subdivs turned on:




This is where I got to before it became time to stop:




Tomorrow evening I'll do more work on his body and hopefully have at least the shape roughed out with all his limbs present and correct. Then on Friday I will hopefully make his head and polish off other areas. By Saturday at the latest he should be done, barring
changes made to posing etc once the other elements are done.

In other news, it looks like my clients are finally paying me, hurray!

I have about 2000 words of write up to do but I'm pretty into it right now so don't want to stop to write it up. I'll write some of it up tonight but not all of it.

Oh, and don't mind Larry's cone, it's a 'cone of shame' like Dug's from UP, don't ask, hehe.

Ok, when we last left our hero he was still blocking out Larry's main form.

The first thing I did when getting back to it was to shape his legs, which were previously square, into a rounder shape:



Next I turned my attention to the head, which I had extruded out of the neck. I realized his topology was no good however, when I turned subdivs on. At the front in the centre of his face was just one polygon with a lot of other polygons adjacent to it. This causes problems for subdivs, often causing strange creases and the like so I deleted this one polygon and selected the edge loop that surrounded the newly formed hole like so:



Then for the hell of it I deleted most of that too and went back a couple more steps. I wanted to make sure I got the topology right so I deleted all of the front of his head:



Here you can see a couple of ploygons already back in place. I extended the edges one by one and by using the 'vertex weld' tool (more on that later) I attached these newly extended polygons to the edges of the hole until the entire hole was filled in. Here Larry is with his face restored and subdivs turned on:



Now he was nice and smooth but I still didn't think the shape was right. That's not the only part of the model I thought looked wrong. Here is the birdseye view:



His tail looks too thick at the start, his head and neck are too big and his body is too square. Apparently I didn't take any screenshots during this bit but I did a bunch of fairly uninteresting tweaking to get his shape and proportions right. Then I focused my attention back on the head and started to build him a jaw by extending out a few polygons:




And here it is with those polygons moved roughly into place:




Turning subdivs on temporarily is a great way of moving past the technical side of things and seeing if, artistically, the model is working. As of this point, I don't think the jaw was:



I retooled it a bit as well as other parts of Larry's anatomy but, tired of Larry I moved on to sculting the T Rex (I've just finished the basic form of the T-Rex, sans appendages, and I feel ready to go back to Larry).


As usual I started with a cube and then started to move the edges into his basic head shape:



I moved the t rex away from the axis for this, moving him roughly into the position he will be in the final image. This makes it impossible to use the symmetry function however since the T-Rex is not really symmetrical I don't mind, an over reliance on symmetry is a bad thing anyway and so almost straight away I broke the symmetry and started creating the T-Rex's expression. First I moved the top of his snout to the rough angle necessary for his snarl:




Next I moved the top of his head, his eyebrows essentially, to form the basic shape of a frown.




Then I added a few edge loops on the snout so that I would have some polygons with which to form his mouth. I formed 3 more rows of polygons.




I pushed the middle row of polygons back into the snout to form a basic mouth.




Next I added some more polygons no the top at the front of his snout and started forming the shape of his nostrils:




Here you can see that most terrible of things, a triangle!



Fortunately in this instance, since the shape of this part of the nostril actually is triangular, it's not causing any problems.

To form the actual nostril itself I needed some more polygons so I subdivided the left nostril (I had to do them individually as of course I don't have symmetry, it makes many things take longer, but I think it's worth it in this instance). I had to do this manually as the auto subdivision would divided the one polygon into 5 oddly shaped ones for some reason instead of the neat 4 it should give me.



I subdivided it again and then did the same to the other nostril. I pulled in the middle vertex to form the basic shape of his nostrils. Ignore the hole visible in his left nostril, this is merely a graphical glitch caused by my non-professional graphics card which was not designed for this sort of thing. As I think I mentioned after being unable to source the AMD firepro V7900 I wanted at a reasonable price I am waiting until SIGGRAPH (a if not the big computer graphics conference where Pixar first made their fame) when AMD will unveil the full details of their firepro W series. Even if they are still half a year away from release hopefully the announcement should drive down prices of the V7900 to a reasonable level (currently most places are selling it above RRP!).




Next I subdivided the polygons on top of the nostrils so that I could give them their curved shape.




I then decided that I didn't like the look of the nostrils with just one vertex pulled back so I undid that and then subdivided again so that I had 4 polygons I could push back to form the back of each nostril.




I then turned subdivs on. Although I was happier with the shape of the nostril it still wasn't finished and the shape of the mouth and lower jaw were all wrong. I'll go into why turning subdivs on affects the shape so much in my next post.



That's all I'm going to write for now, although I still have 32 pictures to post so there's plenty more to come!