HARDCORE MODELING!: 80's Cartoon:Voltron

[FICTIS]

Awesome, can’t wait to see it textured

[energise]

This is looking so sweet, Angel. Bringing back memories.

As for mental ray… GRRR! GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
… that’s why I got sidetracked there for a bit, and started working on the tomb instead of texturing. I have an issue where mental ray wants to facet everything, even with normal maps, and smoothed vertex normals, etc etc. As nub as I am with rendering, you’d think I could get it right at least once, but I run into an issue with mental ray every time.

Anyway, awesome work man. :buttrock:

Sounds like you havent checked “smooth target model” in mudbox/zbrush =)

then ofcourse we have the frustrating catmullclark problem that slices the mesh strangely, but can be fixed with this mel line

addAttr -ln “miExportCCMesh” -at bool mentalraySubdivApprox1

[energise]

hummm… ok, the pose is a bit tame. I want to make the Lions the star of the image not the sword but I do agree it is important. The problem with this model is the limited movement I have to work with, specially the legs, very hard to get a good aggressive pose but I’ll try again and see what I come up with. Let me look into the TF Armada stuff, thanks guys!.

Oberyn, the most common MR problem I run into all the time is the out of memory issue, I know it goes away in W64 with plenty of RAM but for now I’m stuck with XP32 and 3 Gigs of RAM so what I do to solve the problem is render separate elements which I usually do anyways, and regions for large images.

Yeah i hate it when the rendering dies at 90%! =P There is one way to kinda solve the problem though… in the “batch render oprions” you can type in the memory limit MR will use for rendering. If you have 3gigs of ram try typing in 1,5gig or so… (taking in account that windows etc drain lots of memory) then the rendering will take longer but be more stable!

[energise]

yeah MR has its share of issues… all I did was set a subd approximation node and applied it to every mesh, it works on everything bu the head… at rendering it is invisible, checked the usual stuff, render flags in the shape node, also re-saved, re imported (that sometimes fixes weird things) etc… I ended up just using smooth. I just wish smooth had a display value and a render value separately. If you happen to run into this and find the solution LMK, I’ll do the same.

haha aand the final one

This was a hard nut to crack hmm… kinda stupit question to ask but… have you tried to give the head a separate approximation? =P what happens then?

[RageOfAges]

yeah MR has its share of issues… all I did was set a subd approximation node and applied it to every mesh, it works on everything bu the head… at rendering it is invisible, checked the usual stuff, render flags in the shape node, also re-saved, re imported (that sometimes fixes weird things) etc… I ended up just using smooth. I just wish smooth had a display value and a render value separately. If you happen to run into this and find the solution LMK, I’ll do the same.

I don’t know if you’ve tried any of these.

*delete history
*re-import the head geometry
*if you saved your scene as .mb, try saving it as .ma then reloading. Or vise-versa.
*import your scene rather than opening it. Try in both .ma/.mb formats. (I used maya when I was at school, and whenever I had MR issues, my teacher recomended I do this. It resloved the issue 95% of the time).

That’s all I got (I haven’t used Maya since version 7, so its been a while). Good luck and I hope you get it resolved soon.

-Rage

[angel]

Hey guys, thanks for all the suggestions! unfortunately I tried them all last night and that’s when I gave up and just used smooth. Since its only the head I can deal just using smooth.

Hum, you know what? I’ll try again using my office workstation, its a far better machine… will see it the extra power and RAM helps, otherwise I can live with smooth on the head.

[janhasse]

look very nice

[angel]

thx jhasse!

Hey I got it fixed!
It didn’t occurred to me last night to check for non-manifold geo… just ran mesh>cleanup>nonmanifold geometry. Problem fixed

[WyattHarris]

hummm… ok, the pose is a bit tame. I want to make the Lions the star of the image not the sword but I do agree it is important.

Well then, go with the classic.

“Form Blazing Sword” Roooaaarrrrrrrrr!

[WyattHarris]

Man Snows, that really looks cool now that you’ve got him up and moving around.

[sagleon]

Looking great Mr. Snows! The details are dead on. The pose I know will be a bit difficult because of geometry clipping, but I would focus on using the scale and camera angle in case there is no way around that issue. Looking great!

[angel]

Thanks guys for the comments

Wyatt, I played with the classic, blazing sword pose and it just wasn’t working for me… looked ugly. After you posted I gave it another try and got better results, however for a turn table it wouldn’t work… I “cheated” to make it work and it would show in the turn table. Maybe I can use the other pose for the turntable.

Here it is

[Azereus]

now thats voltron

[angel]

Hi Damian, I’m not completely sold on that pose… will see.

here is the blazing sword

[RageOfAges]

Lol I didn`t have time to post here this morning while my night shift was ending, but I was gonna suggest nearly that exact pose!!

But now that I see it I too am not sold on it. I think you have a great start on it. Perhaps just playing with the focal length of your camera you can get something you like.

-Rage

[WyattHarris]

Yeah, I guess in a turntable it would look much less epic. Still, that looks freakin’ awesome to me.

Blazing Sword is looking good, keep up the great work.

[Omnilight]

the viewport screen-cap looks awesome!

[razeverius]

awesome pose man!:bounce:

[energise]

thx jhasse!

Hey I got it fixed!
It didn’t occurred to me last night to check for non-manifold geo… just ran mesh>cleanup>nonmanifold geometry. Problem fixed

WOOOHOOO =P happy for ya!

[angel]

hey guys, thanks you for all the comments and support!

It seems like you guys really like the classic pose. One of the reasons I’m questioning this pose is mainly because I don’t really know what else to do with it, the space background is boring to me. For the other pose I was thinking to make a small dirt crater around the feet, with rocks and mountains on the background with some fiery debris falling from the sky…

Anyway here is an AO render of the classic pose