Progress report

Progress report:
Been focussing on modelling lately, as opposed to setting and rendering scenes in Poser.
Still working on lizard guy model in Wings, fiddling with bits here and there. At some point I need to make him some teeth and eyeballs or he's going to have trouble finding a lady lizard to go out with.
Going great guns with Shade. I'm really enjoying using this package and have so far produced a space gun and a rocket pack for one of my Poser characters with it. The nice thing about it is that everything I've made with it so far has come out looking clean - and the fact that you can draw shapes with it instead of box modelling really speeds up the modelling process.
Fiddled about a bit with Carrara last night. Have had it installed on my pc for months but haven't done anything with it yet.
Searching for 3d lego men to use in one of my jokey pics, came across a package on the internet called LDraw. It's fantastic - a whole software package, complete with a huge library of parts, to build 3d lego models. I get the impression that there is a big, cultish following of grown-up kids using this software and producing parts for it.
The down side: Used it to make a model, used another program to convert the resulting .dat file into .obj format, but when I tried to import it into Poser and Wings, it looked all wrong. Bits missing, leaving square-shaped holes all over the place.
The strange part - I imported the same model into Anim8or, and it looked fine. Tried exporting from Anim8or, and into Poser and Wings, and the holes appeared again.

Lizard guy

This is the model I mentioned in my previous post. Having got over the hurdle of modelling characters in Wings, I'm now being a bit more ambitious and attempting to produce a character whose mouth can be opened and whose expressions can be changed.

Ongoing stuff

Okay, my plan to post one image per week on the Animotions site hasn't quite worked out, but my intentions were good. In my defence, I have been doing other things, like learning how to use Shade, and modelling a new character in Wings. I shall post a pic as soon as is possible - at the moment Internet Explorer is refusing to display the Blogger homepage, and Mozilla doesn't allow me to upload images onto the site. (Sigh!)
With reference to a couple of Poser problems: There is a service pack for Poser 6 that deals with two very precise problems that I've had with the program - one is characters not being saved with morphs, and the other is the program refusing to save a file because it is "out of memory" and creating a blank file instead. I've lost several scenes due to the latter problem. Anyway, service pack now installed, we'll see if it makes a difference. I just sort of assumed that both problems were due to my heavy use of toon shading in Poser, but it appears that they are actually bugs.

Shade

Got a copy of Shade LE version 7 off a cover disc with a magazine this month. I'm always on the lookout for modelling packages with a nice, easy interface - there are a load of modelling programs on my computer now, many of which I've tried, and just given up on because you have to press a combination of keys on your keyboard, rotate your mouse precisely 180 degrees, touch the tip of your nose with the big toe on your left foot and perform the secret handshake before you can extrude a face. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but as a guy with a full-time job, I really don't have the time for a huge learning curve before being able to do any modelling.
However, Shade, so far, seems pretty blinking simple, and it "seamlessly interfaces with Poser" - I have yet to explore that aspect of it, but if it enables me to make props, import them into Poser and toon-ify them without any complication, then brilliant.
Have decided to aim for producing one image per week to post on the Animotions site.

Have posted a few of my "Mr Snout" pictures on the Animotions website (www.animotions.com) and have had some positive responses. It's so nice to finally get some images out there - I spend so much time agonising over whether my pictures look finished enough or not that nobody else ever gets to judge them.
They've been done using the technique that I described in my post of 27/11/2005. The one above was done using Poser 6's toon shading facility, but I'm not entirely sure about it. The outlining on the character looks a bit weak, but when I try to increase the size of the outline, Poser refuses to comply beyond a certain thickness.

Wolf again

Haven't posted anything here for a while, so I thought I'd post this.
Have been spending a bit of time making characters, morphing, adding clothes, etc. Not with any particular story in mind, but something might come to me at some point. There's been a sale on DAZ recently, giving me an opportunity to get hold of some new gear for my characters.

Hmmmm...

Can't shake this feeling, looking through some of the images on a website like CGTalk.com, and then looking through the gallery on a Poser site (like DAZ) that there is a big dividing line between Poser users and other 3d creators - mainly that, with Poser images, you inevitably get repetitions of the same blinking figures doing the same things over and over again. It was an issue that came up on the Animotions website recently, where a discussion started over whether Poser was a help or a hindrance to creators of 3d work. Some users expressed the opinion that a lot of artists who use Poser tend to get a bit lazy. I could see their point.
There's got to be some kind of middle ground between the kind of (slightly sickeningly) super-talented 3d artists who build their own figures completely from scratch, and rig them and pose them and make clothes for them and build an entire cityscape for their character to live in and probably built their own blinking computer to boot, and the other kind of artists who are really just producing (yet more) images of Spider Man swinging through a city scene or Victoria 3 looking sultry as she poses with a huge gun, for fun - a hobby, nothing more.
Question is, where do I fall on that sliding scale between artist and hobbyist, and do I really want to be there? I have this creative urge to make visual things, and yet can't help thinking that using Poser is just like making Lego models or photographing Action Man in a costume that you've made for him.