80's cartoon Post Mortem: Tell us what you learned...

#41

let me suggest either Goku or Vegeta. :smiley:

#42

lolā€¦nahā€¦olivia wilde :thumbsup:

#43

I wanna model this guy.

#44

You my friend should write poetryā€¦
Fine post.

I will be posting the Plug on Saturday Morning (I am going to a midnight screening of Trek II)
ā€¦
and to all keep in mind.

We are here to have fun. That is the key.

-R

#45

Great! That means all Friday is available to tweak and fuss over tiny details. :slight_smile:

Many thanks, Roberto! Have fun at the screening!

Cheers!

#46

Saturday AM? That means on Friday I have time to go to work at midnight, come home at 8, Work on my Smurfs 'til Noon, Actually get 8 hours sleep for the first time in what seems forever, Get up, work on my Smurfs 'til Saturday Am. Iā€™m definitely gonna have a complteted entry!

Thanks Roberto!

#47

currently working in the medical animation business Iā€™m bias towards this one:buttrock:
I think it is a bigger challenge.

#48

wow so that means you guys have been together thru alota modelling challenges eh?:D. Human Cutaway, is that like the machine thing where you see the interiors? lol. Iā€™ve just starting modeling humans so maybe this could speed up my learning and my final exams at school are over and itā€™s vacation for a month so. Yeah! Iā€™d love to see the new challenge n join :bounce:

#49

I was originally going to make a snarky comment but you guys changed the tone so quickly I feel calm again. :smiley: What first attracted me to these challenges was how even though it was for fun it still brought out such amazing entries. I mean freakinā€™ Rick ā€˜Monstermakerā€™ Baker himself competed once, how cool is that. Then you see guys like Albert Feliu, Samar Vijay and Kris Kosta, I just had to start competing.

But speaking of deadlines when I was pushing to finish last night my boss called to interrupt me. We have a client in Singapore and last night was their daytime so I had to stop and troubleshoot their PC issues from across the world. Talk about adding 1 last hurdle to overcome.

#50

Mind if I change the topic? What did you personally learn during this challenge?

For me I think this has been the most productive challenge for me yet. I finally cracked the ZB->LW riddle thatā€™s been bugging me for 2 years, thank you Rage for the eureka moment. With that handled I could finally start utilizing many of the features in LW that I had been putting off learning because I had no need for them.

The other good thing is I learned, pretty extensively I might add, is how not to use ZB and LW together. Things that I had been doing, without thinking about it, in ZBrush just donā€™t work well in LW so Iā€™ll have to keep that in mind the next time.

Oh, I also learned my PC can handle rendering 5.5million polygons in LW and 1 GB in texture memory, donā€™t know what the limit is yet. :thumbsup:

So what about you guys, make any personal progress this round?

#51

I learned a lot about the Maya-Zbrush workflow.

The main thing i learned, was that this is a realy bad idea:

To pose the character before taking it to Zbrush for detailing.

Why? well it is pretty obvios, but i didnt realize the importance until i made the mistakeā€¦

Because without the chance to scuplting with symetry, its not the double effort you have to do, but 3 times because you have not only to do the same in the both sides, but the constant comparison between the two sidesā€¦IS A PAIN. So please dont do this at home.

Surprisingly i had not issues with the displacement and colour maps. I was a little skeptic about i could get them right, and now im much more confident about this topic.

From a long time i wanted to finish a character using this workflow and this challenge gave me the perfect excuse. This challenge (and all of this kind) did a lot for me, im very happy about participating in it, and im unhappy for the fact that (mostly because i begun later in the last week) i didnt have the time to share more and to post the progress, wich ill try to do next time if i organize better.

About the next challenge, the human cutaway looks great for me, but the other alternative of the 15 expression is very good too, so, we always win:applause: .

cheers:thumbsup: .

#52

Yay! I think I may actually have the time to participate in this next round now that school is over and done with. I would love to try my hand at the human cutaway, great excuse to study anatomy more in depth!

#53

I learned two main things that arenā€™t even specifically about modeling.

I actually had a lot of technical issues while that I can avoid in the future while I was rigging my characters. It resulted in me having to completely re-rig some parts of them two or three times. You can kind of tell that part took me a long time during the competition because of how my post kind of dies once I really get into rigging and then just recently picked back up ^_^.

The other thing I learned is that I really need to upgrade my computer.

OH! Also a third thing, I need to stop using such high res textures.

#54

I think this is dependant on what your doing. For my character it was easier to pose then sculpt him, the muscles on the raised arm and leg react differently to the lowered ones, the opposite muscels in each limb are flexed, so it would be an error to use symmetry sculpting in my case, and though I had to scuplt the entire mesh, and paint it with no symmetry I still have a decent level of asymetrics in the sculpt. Nothin organic should ever be completly symetrical.

I learned on this a few things about mudbox, and max and vray.
I also learned I need more ram, infact a whole new pc, My scene files were 500mb in size at the end of the Mummra project, mainly due to the cracked floor and hi poly version of mummra, (the displacment would not work properly for some reason, got real close but no cigar).
I learned that Im a better box modeller than an extrude modeler (max thing), an that modelling organics makes your hard surface modelling much stronger.

Cheers guys, it was alot of fun.

#55

i learnedā€¦how not to be lazy and just play computer games a lot lolā€¦

hhmmm, i did learn how to model ā€œmoreā€ properly,and make sure my wires are all alright coz before I kept modeling the wrong way just to get what I want:rolleyes: and i never really thought Iā€™d make a more human like robot unlike the Dreadnought of warhammer:shrug:.

what elseā€¦looking thru the temp file to look for a maya back up scene and learning bout incremental save(thanks snows) oh, and another thing is doing render passes which i never really tried back then oh and a stupid mistake i made. I should UV map a model first before posing them :D. Hope to join the other challenges since school is over:twisted:

#56

I have learned not to give up on doing my own projects! This has been really great and I plan to start entering more often.

Iā€™ve also realized how much practice I need on rendering and modeling backgrounds. I am still struggling on the foliage for my scene. I just have a temp up in the final post, miss understood thought I had to post to be able to revise.

(by the by RobertoOrtiz I would appreciate not being included in the entries that finished by the dead line)

Thank you all for your help you guys are really amazing artists.

#57

Great Idea Wyatt.

For this challenge I actually learned quite a bit.

1)know and respect the limitations of your hardware.
2)Thereā€™s no need to export 2k displacement maps for objects and subtools when rendering out a 2 k final image. If the head, for example, takes a quarter of that render, ideally all you need is a 512 disp map for it.
3)While I have no limitations to the amount of reference I gather, I find my conceptual stage ends there. What I need to do is to finalize my concept BEFORE proceeding to the creation process. This is something I always have trouble with because I get so eager to start modeling

If I can keep these in mind on the next entry, I belive I`ll do quite well.

Iā€™d also like to take this opportunity to ask people to suggest what they prefer for the next challenge: Anatomy: Cutaway or 1 face, 12 expressions. Iā€™m sure itā€™ll be easier for Roberto to decide if he has more feedback.

Apart from that, this challenge has been a blast and, because of the number of wipā€™s Iā€™ve been able to follow, has had a huge impact on my workflow.

Cheers and good luck to all during the voting process.

-Rage

#58

well as for what i learnt

  • iā€™m now better at organic modeling
  • i can kinda rig things nowā€¦kinda
  • i now know that the best light setups are often the simplest
  • i also know that its best to pick one idea and stick with itā€¦thats my biggest problem with these challenges, always changing my mindā€¦

as for the next challenge i really would prefer the face one as the anatomy cutaway seems creatively restricting to meā€¦plus weā€™ve only just done a cutaway challenge

iā€™ve also gathered a crap load of reference for oliviaā€¦which wasnā€™t exactly the hardest task in the world :love:

maybe for future challenges roberto should narrow the choices down to 3 or 4 and then put up a poll to let us decide what each challenge will beā€¦it might encourage more community involvement tooā€¦

#59

I learned / trying:

Finally I try rendering in XSI :smiley: To now Iam only modeling and maping in XSI :slight_smile: But Iam not newbe in rendering. Previously I working in MAX/MR/Vray. Now I know that XSI rendering is good too but I must learn a lot of still. hehe

and I hope that I have time for next HMC :slight_smile: This is my firts entry and i like it because finally I can do something personal what I like.

#60

  1. Put more time in the planning stage. My ā€œflying by the seat of my pantsā€ workflow bit me in the butt again but like Rage said itā€™s hard to not just jump right into the fun stuff.

  2. Put more time into the base mesh. I need to take the time to properly learn how to model: feet, hands, ears and noses. After making so many I realize that they are all afterthoughts and it shows in the big renders.

  3. You may need 1 million polys to get good polypaint results in ZBrush but once you finish and create your texture it looks good on the low poly models. The megapoly levels arenā€™t always necessary after that.

  4. Manage and put some thought into my file system. This is the first time Iā€™ve ever had a project go over 1GB in assets alone and alot of that was not needed. Decide which models REALLY need 2k textures.

  5. I learned to not be afriad of giving it a try even if that try sucks. The next one will be even better and the practice is more important than the immediate result. Too many times Iā€™ve phsyced myself out simply by stared at a blank canvas and thinking thereā€™s no way I could do it good enough. Maybe not the first or second attempt but if I keep at it itā€™ll get better and better until itā€™s how I want it.

  6. Watch those deadlines, they come up fast everytime. :smiley: