[kryssmen]

Didzis, the fixes are nice.
i notice you have alot of edge loops in the tail but have very few in the body(back hump). when it comes to zbrush you can always do a local subdivide beyond the main subdivision level, but if you plan to keep this mesh instead of retopologizing it later you may want to even out the poly size and quantity as well. when ever you have larger or fewer polys it wont subdivide to the same density as the areas with alot of polygons close together.

if you dont plan on detailing those areas much then you may not need to add anymore edgeloops...

me personally i would add a few edgeloops and work them into the flow.

looking forward to seeing this sculpted!

[arttorney]

Muddling my way through this, little by little. Looks like I have to chop off some snout if I want it to look like the thumb I am trying. I can also be more aggressive about dragging the ends of the muscle balls into one another. Perhaps messing with the mesh tension a bit ...

[kryssmen]

hey arttorney
just curious, the 3d program you are using is it possible to edit the mesh in it; remove polygons, merge geometry add edges etc.

you could always try blender, i believe it is a free 3d program.

[arttorney]

According to the manual I can do that in Art of Illusion (AOI). If I convert to triangle mesh I have a whole box of point, edge, and face tools. I'm still learning the point tools and haven't really gotten around to edge or face mode yet. Theoretically in Meshlab I can also remove that internal gunk (I think it would be by selecting all the surface polygons and creating a new layer with just the surface polygons). The Meshlab merge tool turned everything into one object but didn't delete that inside stuff for me.

The actual problem is me, rather than the programs. I still don't really know what I am doing and I am subjecting the public to the agonizing display of me trying to figure out how to work my tools. That's also why you see me messing around with the various lighting and rendering effects. I figured out something pretty important a couple days ago that allowed me to start pulling those muscles into a more natural looking shape and I have deleted a few funky looking vertices already. I have a lot of learning still ahead of me.

I have Blender that I was meaning to turn to when I get to mapping anyway. (currently I have pretty much figured out how to texture things with 3D procedural textures (in AOI), but as you probably know that doesn't always get the job done.) Blender gets along with the graphics card on my Windows machine but I think the version of Python I got is too new for the version of Blender I got. Besides graphics cards Blender also is apparently finicky about which version of Python you have. AOI's documentation suggests that I can texture just the surface of objects but it is a little vague about whether I can make those maps I see people doing. Blender looks stronger there.

If I never achieve a truce with Blender I was aiming to see if PovRay has appropriate functions in there to do whatever texture/shading/mapping related stuff I can't get AOI or Meshlab to do. This weekend I was aiming to get to the bottom of it because I figure there are at least seven or eight hundred useless polygons inside of there (and they might interfere with the skeleton making function which I presume is the "rigging" I see mentioned here and there).

I'd like to achieve truce with Blender. It has a game engine while AOI only goes as far as skeletons and scripted animation. I could also then try the "Suicidator Random City Generator" plugin which looks cool from the screenshots I have seen.

Also on the "to do" list is to get some kind of screenshot program for the Windows machine so I can show people what went wrong on appropriate discussion forums and get feedback. Screenshot software comes free and easy on my Linux machines but I can't seem to find it in the cesspool that is Vista. (It also can't even drive a Microsoft brand usb keyboard I bought, ::grumble grumble::.)

I think I need to add some more points to that box that is the back end (and the shoulders one) so I can make them a little more subtle/natural looking.

[Didzis]

Posting my progress, a few hours of sculpting before getting on an airplane for Hawaii!!

[Ogi-G]

coming along nicely didzis! anyone else making progress?

[arttorney]

I still intend to work on mine, though I got a little side tracked with moderating and writing job applications, and reading up on rigging and animation. Maybe I will spend an hour or two trying to work with the face tool on those boxy looking places and perhaps seeing if spline meshes, tube, array, or lathe tools work better for me. I think this boolean approach is better suited to robots.

Actually it looks like AOI inadvertently converts everything into one object when you import it back from another program as an .obj, with the result that it can no longer do a lot of the stuff to that object that AOI is supposed to be able to do. I can't even get it to go from "no smoothing" to "approximating smoothing" without the whole object disappearing. Another person on the AOI forum figured out that this problem can be "solved" by deleting all the various subunits that used to be separate objects until there is only one left. That sort of defeats the purpose of the approach I was taking. So much for this experiment. I am probably not going to be able to make anything presentable out of this. Even when I brought the first thing in from SketchUp a light source was apparently set in stone at that time that I can't affect very much. Blender=fail due to it not recognizing my version of Python. (and the UI of course)

[astroAJ]

Arttorney have a look at a program called True Space I don't know to much about it other that its free and I've seen some relatively good artwork come out of it. It might work if u cant get Blender fixed

[kryssmen]

Hey drfring,
Nice of you to join us. You don't have much time left in this competition, only 5 days.
I really like the top right thumbnail, the one with the big claw.

Goodluck!

[kryssmen]

Latest update on my sandcrawler.

I've been quite sick these last few weeks and havent had the energy to do much on this. i will try to finish this by sunday!

[kryssmen]

Im goin to extend this challenge until the 30th of November at 11:59 pm.



For those of you who have something to post do so by then.

reminder: front, side and 3/4. beauty shot is nice too!

[kryssmen]

47 minutes to post guys!
~ i won't be able to submit anything, I'm dealing with a vomiting 2 year old.

[kryssmen]

OK, so this challenge didnt go so well with the number of people involved and those who were, not able to complete on time. ( myself included)

so no winner this round...

Hopefully we can get more challengers involved in the 3D creature challenge # 4 : POKEMON!!!

Thanks for participating this round and what was posted for the most part was great!