Fighting machine in Carrara 5 pro

The only modeling I tried was some latheing. So many things to learn so little time to do it in. I'll let you know what I think of the vertex modeller when I find it! Thanks for the tips. I'll try to pay special attention to those bits when I reach them.

. If I was you and not cared about the modeling part, I would go straight to shading, terrain lab, and tree lab, and rendering chapter. But the problem with that is you might miss a few small but important things to know. Like (off of my head). *closing object editing labs after you are finished working on them, that will free up memory. *a bunch of rendering things to know. *where to find stuff *spline object become low resolution automatically when they are far away from camera and more detailed when close to camera. *what modifiers there are and what they do. *volume object presets such as fire/clouds have there own labs. *many more Have you tried the vertex modeler? Isn't it a pain? As far as I can tell you have to crease every sharp edge on the model in order to make it sharp, instead of just choosing an angle of softness. I mean wtf! Help? someone know a way around that?

I'm about 30 pages into the 860 pages. I've got 350 printed out so far. I plod along. I've got a paper bryce 5 manual which came with the product. It looks pretty dog earned now but I much prefer that to looking up things on the computer. I have more difficulty ready off of a monitor than I do off paper. Don't know if that is due to my dislecsia or just that reading off the screen is more fatiguing on the eyes. I still haven't learned the difference between the words reflection and refraction - they both look the same to me - which has led to some frustration in the shader. Hopefully I will just learn where everything is and then not have to worry too much about the acutal words. I'm looking at pictures of plumbing on google images at the moment - I use a mixture of making stuff up and refference material and being guided somewhat by the mechanics of wings3D. The glasses model was more a case of copying my glasses though, I was quite critical with that model - just kept taking them off and sqinting at them in front of the montior and then scaling the model till it overlapped the outine of the glasses themselves. The hard bit (for me) is to stick at the modeling until it is done and not get something made and spend the rest of the evening playing around with lighting combinations.

. Sorry about that Dave, everything looked ambient this morning waking up after 4 hours of sleep ^_^ about tha robot.. its not ready yet, I was only testing. Still need to finish texturing and rigging the model, as well as building a low resolution city, because I will be using non photo realistic renderer, this might take me a day or two to make, depends. It took me more then a month to model it, and it was a nightmare at times, very difficult modeling from crappy screen shots and photos of actual models from random angles, and placing in all the details at the same time. But hey, I finished reading the manual for Carrara, and I have to say it is the worst one I have ever read, some things written twice, rendering part is all the way at the end, very very limited number of visuals, missing steps, some things are not even relater to carrara v5. Bryce's manual is 5x times better, plus it has a search option.

I like it. Can't say much not having played around with Carrera yet. The model is cool and the landscape created for it very fitting. I like the sky and - though not exactly a fan of lens flare - it looks appropriate here; the sky would be too empty without it. I also like the lighting, but something seems to be amiss. Look at the size of the two "mounds" in the foreground, look at the angle of the sun and be surprised at the short shadows.

For me there does not seem to be any ambient abuse going on here. The evenness of the light comes from the sky I think which looks fairly even. This is a more natural ambient. The lens flare is terrific, and so is the sun itself. The red horizon is awesome. With softened shadows this would look like ascene from Transformers.

Cool. I'd love to see those spiders textured. The lens flare is very well done. Many artists mercilessly apply lens flares to all their scenes.

Ambient occlusion? Er... I did turn the ambience off in the scene. Maybe the legs are getting light from the sky since the scene is lit with global illumination based on the photoreal sky gradient. Are you going to post your gigantic robot/thingy thing then?

. Very cool dave! I love this model. For some reason I too rendered a model of a gigantic robot/thing in one of those terrain scenes. Also, if you didn't use ambient occlusion during render you should turn off ambiance, I can see the legs glowing a bit.