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!

I have a friend crashing at my place tonight then we're going house hunting tomorrow so I'm going to write up all I've done so far as I won't get another chance to do so before Thursday.

Ok so as you can see in the last two pictures, turning subdivisions on really changes the shape of the T-Rex. That's because there are so few polygons. The less polygons there are the more effect visually turning subdivs on has. Every polygon is essentially averaged out with the polygons adjacent to it so if two are at 90 degrees to each other a curve that goes the whole distance between the two polygons is created. If those polygons are large the curve will be very large and dramatically alter the shape, if they are small then the curve will be small and less noticeable, whilst still smoothing the model and making it more aesthetically pleasing.

The upshot of this is that I need more polygons around the edges and cavities of the model. I start off by adding more at the mouth:




Next I moved on to the nostrils:




Since I now have two monitors to work with I decided to start using them. Here you can see the model with subdivs turned on again. It's still not perfect but it's a lot closer.




Next I shaped the nostrils to be closer to the shape of my clay model and less round.




I added some more polygons underneath the nostril to give it some definition and differentiate it from the rest of the snout.



I also brought the right (camera right) side of the snout up.



And here it is after some further modification:




I turned subdivs on and found that it still wasn't right, however:



I made some further adjustments.



In the perspective view and the front view the snout looks fine but as you can see in the birdseye view on the right the snout is sticking out far too much, the benefits of having two monitors!

That's not the only problem, turning subdivs back on revealed that the mouth was still misshapen.



At the side of the mouth it was easily the worst with some pinching going on.



As usual it was caused by topology problems. The topology in general was a mess, including an n-gon highlighted in the next picture (an n-gon is simply a polygon with an n number of sides where n >4) and there's no excuse for leaving ngons on a model because they can always be broken down into 4 sided polygons (quads).



I deleted that polygon and a few others and then replaced them, only much neater and that got rid of the pinching.

I'm taking a break for a bit, part two in about an hour.

Once I'd fixed the pinching it became clear that the shape of the jaw left something to be desired:



When I added another edge loop to the lower and upper jaw I beveled them as well. It means that it keeps its shape much better with subdivs turned on but because I hadn't done the same to the sides of the mouth and the bottom of the model it still looks very odd. Easily fixed, I beveled the edges of the side of the mouth and the bottom:




And here it is again with subdivisions turned on post-beveling. As you can see it's made a massive difference:




I had fixed the topology on ones side of the mouth but not the other. It was time to rectify that:



Here you can see I deleted a few polygons.

Then for the sheer unadulterated thrill of it I deleted a few more:



I also switched the view on my other monitor to four view mode so I could see the model from the right too. Here the model is with neater topology. Ok it's not super super neat but they are all at least quads which is enough.



Here you can see a bit of pinching going on around the nostril caused by the polygon next to the nostril having about a billion sides ¬_¬



To fix it I start by beveling the edge of the nostril.



An improvement, but still some pinching:



To fix it I split the large polygon into two:



And now, no pinching:



There was a small amount of pinching and distortion going on the top of the snout:



Again I fiddled with the topology to correct it:




In these next two images you can see that when I turn on subdivs the top of the head still loses a lot of its shape:




When in doubt, bevel! I beveled all the top edges. Doing so created a triangle:



I deleted it and moved a vertex to make the two edges meet, sans triangle




And now you can see the model keeps its shape much better with subdivs on.




The basic shape is now more or less finished. I just need to add eye sockets and appendages: teeth, eyes, arms perhaps. As I mentioned I won't be able to do any more work on it until at least Thursday but I should have a lengthy update or two to post by the end of the weekend.

Keep it up!

I can't believe it's been a week since I updated this, house hunting has gotten in the way quite a bit. It's surprisingly hard when you're a student.

I had finished the basic form of the T-Rex but he still needed some clean up, teeth and eyes.

On the side of the model there was some pinching:




I split a polygon so that not so many edges would meet and one point and the pinching would disappear.




For the first tooth I started with a cylinder and then shaped it:






I then scaled it and moved it into position:



I duplicated it and moved it into position for the other tooth. At the time I knew it didn't look quite right but I decided to wait until I'd done the rest to work out why.

Next I made eye sockets:



Then I started making the right eye, starting with a cube.



And here it is in position:



Next I made the eyebrow, starting with a cylinder.



Here it is in position, not quite right:




I furrowed the brow a little more in the middle to give the t-rex more expression:



And here it is in position again:




Then I added an eye ball.




I duplicated the eye and modified its shape a little for the left eye.



And here is the t-rex so far:



To give you something interesting to look at and to show flaws in the model I lit and rendered it:



I think it still needs quite a bit of work in all departments for the final image but for now I'll leave it and block out the rest of the scene.

Tomorrow I'm going house hunting again but there's no excuse why I won't have done enough work on this by the end of Wednesday for another update. In the meantime here's a preview of my next project, Unicorn Hot Tub. It's just a rough sketch, meant to show lighting and composition more than detail.



And here it is before I applied depth of field:

It's great to see this taking shape OP! Btw what are you going hunting for? I hope you aren't going to spear cute fluffy lil animals

Digging it.

Well naturally I assumed that house hunting would go perfectly and we'd find somewhere and everything would be sorted.

Whoops.

Because I'm the only one of the 4 of us in London at the moment the onus has fallen to me to do most of the work and so I've not had anything like as much time for this as I hoped. I've done some work but not really enough for an update.

Anyway, estate agents are closed on Sundays so if not before I will get work on this done!

Wow. Oh dear god. We're only 12 posts into the page and it already takes ages to load. I really need to not post more than 4 images a post anymore.

Today I started redesigning Alrighty Roo for animation since with the current design, that used to be my avatar, his body is too round and essentially a blob, not good for dynamic gestures, and his paws were essentially not even limbs.



First I started by sketching a couple of bad but roughly anatomically correct kangaroos and then started to try out different things, caricaturing them more and more. The bottom left effort was the last drawing of the page and was the first one where I felt I was getting close to what I wanted.




More or less happy with the general design I drew it badly a bunch of times for the sheer thrill of it.




The one part I didn't get right was the ears. I wanted to give him floppy ears as they would be interesting to animate but after trying it out I realized he looked too much like a rabbit. Kangaroos simply don't have particularly floppy ears.




For fun I painted this, fairly quickly and roughly as you can see. I wanted to make it into a full japanese advert/poster thing but I don't have japanese characters installed on my new PC yet and I only wanted this to be a quick thing so I didn't bother. Overall I like it though, despite the roughness. I went for something half way inbetween a Pixar style and an anime style which is something I think I may follow through on to the final animation.

Tomorrow I'm going to draw him in a series of dynamic gestures. Partly for practice and partly to test out and refine him.

I'll probably clean him up in the morning.

WARNING- This is a tangential post not entirely related to Larry.

So, this weekend with the time I had I, as I said, cleaned up the above imaged and sketched him in a couple of gestures. I was going to sketch more but I wanted to take one of them further so I spent all the time I had doing that. Although not strictly related to Larry it serves the same purpose, helping me learn the skills I need to learn so that I can actually have a career in this.

First up the cleaned up version of the above:



Next I moved on to sketching. Because I'm not good at this yet I find it easier to stick to human forms, that I can look at reference material for, act out, and relate to and then adapt them to be more marsupial shaped. Here's an example:



First I drew the stick figure holding the gun and then I drew the kangaroo.

Again, fair warning, I'm not good at this yet. I'm still learning the theory let alone the practice but I think the process is interesting enough. I drew Alrighty Roo first kicking a ball and then having kicked a ball in the air.

For the first sketch I started with a stick figure man:



Then I started to block out Alrighty Roo doing the same gesture.



Next a (poor) attempt at adding detail. The ears are the most erroneous part, they look like cat ears and cause the whole thing to not look like a kangaroo. That's the danger with simple cartoon characters, a few errant lines and suddenly they look like a completely different animal.



I finished with a (marginally) better attempt.



It's still poor. It lacks charm or dynamism but that's ok, I'm still getting to grips with the character and this was my first sketch, I'll get better.

Here is the progression:


I find sports gestures make some of the best sketches (I'm mostly extrapolating from the theory here, I haven't actually made a bunch of sports sketches) as they are really dynamic movements. For my second sketch I went for a more dramatic gesture to try to spur myself into competency.

Again I started with a stick figure.



At this point I was already feeling better about this one. It's a dynamic gesture and therefore there's a larger margin for error before I completely drain all the life out of my attempt.

Here it is blocked out:




And adding detail:




I feel a lot better about this one. It's no masterpiece but it feels a lot closer to competent

Again here is the progression:



And now theory time! One of the cornerstones of animation is 'squash and stretch'.

Although I'm still pretty bad at applying the concept here's a diagram highlighting areas of squash and stretch in my sketch.



That was my first two sketches of Alrighty Roo so hopefully I'll get better.

I kind of knew when I started the sketching that I would want to take one of them further but after that second sketch I felt it was time, mostly because I was bored (what I didn't show you were the aborted sketch attempts I did on paper, apparently I just find digital a lot easier for this specific thing. I don't for everything but for this I do).

I didn't take step by step screenshots as the process isn't at all as complex or interesting as 3D.

Here it is with no effects applied:


And with motion blur on the ball


Some depth of field


More depth of field


I think my favorite is either the 2nd or 4th image. I'm not happy with how photoshop applied the field blur filter in the 3rd and it would've taken a surprising amount of work to fix.

I'm looking at more houses tomorrow so there won't be another update until at least Tuesday. We have an offer pending to rent one so if that's accepted it could be Thursday or even the middle of next week as I'll have to pack/unpack. Whenever it is though, it will be business as usual, back to Larry.

I can't believe how far this is from a new page and it's already loading slowly.

This whole renting a house thing is still dragging on. The problem seems to be that many people are either incompetent, selfish or both meaning that every time we've found a house worth renting it's fallen through for some reason. Anyway, I soldier on.

I'm going to post an update now over about 10 posts in the vain hope that this might reach a new post before it becomes unloadable!

When we last left our hero he had more or less finished work on the T-Rex.

Next I moved on to the rockface to the side of T-Rex.

I started with a cuboid 4 polygons high and about 18 wide and 24 deep




I then extruded it out in to a sort of mayan pyramid shape.




Next I adjusted the scale of Larry, making him smaller and then I moved the T-Rex and the rockface so that they would be in their approximate final positions.

Here are Larry and the T-rex framed in roughly the way they will be in the final image:




At the moment the corners of the rockface are too sharp. It looks artificial. To start to alleviate that problem I beveled the edges. Note that I am not taking care with the left side of the rockface as it will not be seen.



Next I used the sculpt too, which deforms the mesh not unlike a zbrush brush, to break up the form and make it look less regular. The sculpt tool isn't as powerful as the tools in zbrush but it is a lot better than doing this with other normal tools.

So that I could have more detail I subdivided the mesh twice.



I then decided that was too much detail for the style I wanted and so undid one of them.

Here the rockface is after I'd finished with the sculpt tool:

Next I started to make the boulders. I tried starting out with a sphere but because of the topology of a sphere they don't reshape particularly well so I started again with a cube. Here it is after a small amount of deformation:




And here it is completed. You can see on the right I had shots of my model open for reference (unfortunately I couldn't bring it down to London with me)




I duplicated those rocks, resized them and repositioned them to make some more rocks. Then I moved on to the trees. I started with a cube that I then tapered at one end to make it a sort of trapezoid prism shape. I duplicated that a bunch of times to make the tree trunk and then I made a triangular based pyramid for a leaf.



I duplicated that and then positioned the trees.

Next, mostly for fun, just to see where I'm at I started applying materials to the objects:





I didn't bother setting up the lighting though.

It's far from finished yet, even ignoring the fact that Larry himself is only half finished but I do now feel as if the end is at least in sight.

I rendered two versions.

The first one was poster size portrait. To get everything to fit I had to use a really wide angle lens which I actually really like the look of.




I also did a landscape version with a more 'normal' lens.



As things stand this probably makes things fit a little better but by the time I'm done I expect to be in portrait mode using a wide angle I think.

There's plenty of things left to do, bits to clean up and correct (most noticeably the left frond of the right tree) but I like how it's coming together. I might add some clouds or pterodactyls to the sky to liven it up. I might replace the triangular leaves with actual fronds. I'll probably add some more vegetation to give the image more depth (and add a slight fog and depth of field effect to booth). I want to make the rockface a little bigger, maybe I will put a pterodactyl on top of it after all. I will probably put some grass and dirt on the ground and maybe a bit of water as well, because reflections look so nice. I'm not even sure if modo has built in fluids but I can definitely fake it if not.

There's still plenty to do but it's mostly improvement and beautification rather than actual donkey work so I should hopefully get this wrapped up without too many more hours of work. That said, with my housing situation still not sorted out I'm not sure when I'll have time to put those hours in.