i got a little abstract with the renders, also i wanted to get up close to show off some of the detailing. thats enough fun and now back to modellingā¦ i still need to finish the back piece and do the dragon but i may take a bit of time off of futher modelling work to start doing effects for the gun and maybe some other stuff for the bigger projectā¦ it helps to avoid burnout and come back to it fresh sometimesā¦
thanks for all the comments i will try to reply to them all:
first, the āfunny but with serious methodsā comment made me very happy, as that is really what i want to get across. not even funny per se, i mean i am going for comedy because its the easiest thing to do, but just using 3d in the cool ass slick looking way that all of us here on these forums looove 
for something other than what you would ever possibly see in a commercial production. no offense to any of that stuff, its what i do for a living. but i feel like i have all this knowledge thats underused in a creative sense by my day job. so iām doing a comedy. is a gundam with a dick better use of cg than the latest action blockbuster? hmm. well thats why its art
yes, i do plan to make the dragon/hydra, i hope to use displacement mapping for the scales and other detail but retain the stylized design, so its more like a living sculpture than a plausible organic creature, if you follow me.
as far as animated clips, this project is going to be more about still renders than animation just due to time, but i do hope to do a cheesy power up/demo sequence sort of like you were talking about, much as they do in the real animes with these robots. as to blowing up the universe, i like your thinking, but iāll see if i have time 
the guitar is based on a les paul, yes. almost all the design details are refereced from real objects, or pre-existing designs in the case of the giant robot itself. its supposed to be sort of a collage, but of course all smoothed over and integrated into the final thingā¦ but just about everything in there you could find some reference for, either conceptually such as the shoes, or the design detail itself, like the wing flaps which are based on a 747, the guns reference the gun in the a-10 warthog and huey cobra helicopters, blah blah a real list would take pages though it might make for a fun game of concentrationā¦
i think that last render needs tumbleweeds going by, and canyons in the backgroundā¦ its supposed to have a western feel. maybe a cow. i have a feeling iām going to wind up putting a cow in here, its just almost inevitable once giant robots come in, that cows get involved. but maybe later!
the monochroming effect, grain, adjusting levels, depth of field via z-buffer, and highlight blooms, were done in photoshop and afterFX.
iām using a dome light setup with mapped shadows, and then raytraced area lights for the ground and sun light, the combination makes me pretty happy as mixing the two types seems to somewhat hide the shorcomings of each. the render times are only 10-20 mins a frame on my machine, which is a 3800+ athlon with a meager 2 gigs ramā¦ iām sure the renders can look even better, but most of my rendering experience has been in short form video animation, or games, so i have never had time to learn hdri and mental ray and all that coolnessā¦ but i already know regular lights so i am just going with it. but i would welcome comments on that as well, and certainly any comments on how to further improve results with the techniques iām using, rather than āoh just use HDRI mental ray etcā, would be most appreciated. iām hoping to get things into that pixary zone, not that i want it to look exactly like pixar, but where consistently a style is established that is just far enough from photoreality that you get a bit of slack, but realistic and subtle enough to make even a sphere and a box on a plane have visual interest.
