You could try displacemnt for the scales, Just make a B&W textue and use Mental Rays micro triangel dissplacement, Works well in 3ds max but not sure about Maya. Also depending on the size and style of the scales normal maps wouldent be a bad Idea but just remember it still looks flat around the sides.
Anyway Mad props for all this, you have a great sence of humer, and some mad skills. Great work and keep it up.
Hey man, I love the transformer but I think you could improve the materials a little bit. The flat diffuse coloration isn’t doing it for me. Either some glossy specular carpaint or maybe even a toon shader with bright white highlights would really push this piece up a notch I think.
edit: one more thing, I really liked the top view of the Guitar but unfortunately all we can see is the bottom view from this angle (and this angle does have better composition), but it’s a shame I think because the top looks nice
i decided to try the straight grayscale displacement map, since i’m a dumb artist at heart i try th easy way first… this is the result with no other work on the shader and default lighting. it took a bit of tweaking of the values in the map and shader to avoid nasty artifacts but at this point i’m really happy with it EXCEPT it takes FOREVER to render and maya runs out of memory after a couple renders. mental ray just plain craps out and renders but with most of the displacement not showing up… i think i need more than 2 gigs ram. i am using one 1024 x 1024 map tiled for the displacement, and feature based displacement, on a nurbs surface… any tips on this would be appreciated, i dont think i can take these render times. looks pretty nice tho, very close to what i had envisioned with not much tweaking.
i’m also wrestling with the rig, i’ve tried a number of things but nothing is quite there yet… again any advice much appreciated. i want it to be very flexible, like in the concept sketch, able to twist around at any point, but have very specific twist controll all along the length. spline IK might be ok for the necks but the body requires more controll… maybe a few spline IKs in a row with higher level controls to move the whole thing. gotta play around but i’d love any time savers 
as far as comments on the surfacing, thats very WIP, i feel like i may go with a more plasticy surface in the end but i hear ya, its just defaults on the robot still i definitely want to do more with toon and other NPR shading as well.
here we have a quick test of scale and to see if the rig can acheive the pose from the sketch. although it actually looks worse than the other test, it represents a lot more work, as they are posed with an animation rig, not sculpted… i just cant force myself to pose characters directly past the most early stages, i know if i put a rig in i’ll wind up thanking myself later. the snake neck rig is so close to working amazingly well, yet so not actually working good enough yet. if i get it to work i’ll post a tutorial but i have a feeling it just cant be so simple. boy is it looking promising though. this is a bullshit proof of concept rig using about half as many joints and controlls as i plan to actually use, and it looks like thatll just about do the trick. and its going to be so easy to animate with, i may just do an animation to show it off if i can fix these few last issues… sigh. the sort of seemingly little ones that sometimes take months. i’ve had this happen before.
rig animation test: this cracks me up. i had the idea to make it so that each head and neck was a separate guy like a snake… thinking about if it was a boss in a game. had to go re do some stuff but here it is: each of them is now a separate character that can pull off the main body and go about their own business, or they can follow it as one character, via set driven keyed constraits.
well, i may have, but i went in a different direction with the dragon rig. re did everything based on what i learned from that other test and i’m pretty darn happy with how its working out. this is a totally invertebrate rig, no bones all wire deformers. this render is completely posed via animation controlls, nothing “cheated”.
[img]http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/integrate_v1.JPG[/img]
now that i know the dragon’s gonna work i have the mental energy i need to push through and finish the modelling on the back geo and extra details, so im gonna try to do that beforre i have to work for money some more.
its “done”… phew!
and further evidence of my own… whatever, i thought the render layer of the back part sort of worked on its own here:
man it looks sweet. and with the dragon…uuuh it kicks ass. But i dont like the human looking dragon. really
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