wow!! good stuff man!! … a real fast worker too… real impressive…
i starting to look real ultimate now all colored…
question… did u paint the normal map or u actually made a higher res model… hmm… i’m kinda new on all these normal mapping stuff… please educate me… 
bow
okie… back to work for me!!
Glad you like it - and yes, I actually made a higher res model and rendered it out with a normals shader thingy. I built the high-res version (about 50.000 polys, roughly 100.000 triangles) using the UV-template as a guide, and just rendered it with a frontal camera.
Usually you would make your low res mesh, map some clean UVs on that, then build a high-res copy of it and finally bake the normals using something like Nvidia Melody or the ATI Normalmapper, but I didn’t really plan ahead on that bit, so my UVs were not clean enough (didn’t even try, but since I had a lot of UV overlaps, I was pretty sure that the bake procedure would fail… so I went for the brute force manual labour method ) I’ve attached a perspective view of the high-res stuff here:
thanks man… i really wanna try normal mapping now… sound alittle complicate, but very interesting… and top of all… it look too cool!! 
Excellent work! Between this, Supervlieg’s bio-barrel, and a few of the other ones, I don’t think I stand a chance. Great all-around. 
JamesMK excellent on the normal mapping, and creative technique… I’m going to use it sometime :)…
CROWDS WE HAVE A WINNER! HAHAHA
PS: I think i will join this comp after all, how much time is left? BLAA I go and check my self…
Hi James,
Looks great !
Just have to ask which “normals shader thingy” you used?! And where to get it? Per Anders´, DiTools or ?!
Cheers
I used the NLIN shader to generate the tangent map. According to the readme it should be available @ http://www.franks-planet.de but I’m getting a time-out… A search might reveal alternate locations. For the actual normal-mapping in the render, you’d have to use something like ParaNormal.
hey james, this box is a blast !
i think its most evil suppository i ever saw haha 
perhaps you like to make a small turnaround ani to see the normals and specs in action?
Made a Quicktime object VR movie instead:
http://web.telia.com/~u48040664/crateobject.mov
thx. that was fast. but are also normal maps rendered in this vr movie? seems to be pretty plain, isnt it?
They are, but they end up being pretty subtle with the flat default light, high compression and low resolution… I made another one first which showed them off better, but the file ended up being 15 megs, so I couldn’t be bothered posting that
Nice movie you got there.
Just a though from looking at the crate. Maybe it could use a contrast color, like some red or blue striping to break up the greyishness.
Hey James!
Nice work BTW
I was wondering what you used to make that quicktime VR thingy? I’d like to make one for mine when I get to that stage…
Supervlieg - Yeah, good point. It looks a little colourless right now… but I’ve already called it, so I’m not touching it again
Pit - Goody!
Dargon - Well, the QT VR is really easy in my case, since Cinema 4D supports that output format natively… I just set a few params and hit render. Have honestly no idea how to do it elsewhere, but since the format as such is basically just a movie anyway with a few extra bits set in the QT header (just guessing here) I wouldn’t be surprised if there are plugins for whatever app you’re using that can handle it.
lol - I came to the same conclusion myself a couple of days ago. Really sucks, doesn’t it?
