I always think that's a funny thing to say "Cat's are solitary creatures." If that was the case than they certainly wouldn't take to hanging around us as much as they do (free food and bedding notwithstanding). Cat's aren't solitary... they just aren't co-dependent... like dogs.

I actually had a buddy who had cats that I'm covinced actually had dog brains implanted into them. These were clearly the two nicest cats I've ever met.


Hm... so a modeling question (I posted one on the Daz forums but I'm not satisfied with the answer). If you have two different objects, in this case a spindle and a prop blade. How do you stick the two together and then copy them onto a bunch of similiar faces? Everytime I use the "copy objects" button it... uh... vomits geometry onto my workspace.

Are you fuzing the 2 objects before you start cloning?

No, should I be?

I went back to the drawing boards and ended up using extrude to solve the problem in the first place. Here's a screen grab of the final product.

Ducted Fan

Not spectacularly interesting I know but I think it turned out okay. Learned quiet a bit about meshing too... and I'll probably end up rebuilding it with a lower poly count soon.

yeah, I'm preferring extrusion for this sort of thing as well, plus the parameters are quite a bit more controlable for this sort of thing.

http://doctaotsu.deviantart.com/art/What-I...-Sleep-87803881

Working on a model of the Navy LCS... Hexagon does have some issues though, starting to look at uh... some more expensive options. Anyone know anything about softimage vs. modo? Softimage has a "foundation" version although I'm not sure if that just means it's crippiled.

...pretty cool. Will be watching your progress. Beginning to work on one of the ships from my SF story (the one with the Sabrinno mentioned earlier). When I get the basic Hull configuration laid down I'll post an image.

What issues are you experiencing? I've heard some decent things on softimage and modo, but overall they're unlike Hex and more like Blender. Hex is closer to Mudbox or Zbrush, a digital sculpting tool. Once you get into high end spline, nurbs and poly modeling tools you'll have a hella learning curve (but its worth it)

Nice ship there. though I might go with some smoothing options on parts of it.

Hmm... Hexagon is giving me issues... minor ones yes but annoying considering I spent real money on it. It's just has a couple of minor but annoying transient bugs (the latest is that it won't allow me to hang and image on my background axis.), there are also features (such as being able to subdivide basically at will) that are omitted or harder to get to than they should be.

But we'll see. I've promised myself to wait a month before I move on to a better program. I'm also not a little annoyed that I have to export it to do anything... you know, interesting like skin it or animate it. The idea of having one program that does everything is very tempting to me. It also sounds like Softimage and/or modo are better suited for building vehicles and what not...

I actually think I might be dropping the big dollars on the Softimage XSI foundation program. It's 500 bucks but it's... well... probably more program than I'll ever need again.

Plus it doesn't have a magical 1 year license of uselessness.


Oh yeah, I haven't thrown down any smoothing just yet. I wanted to wait until I had all the dangly bits in place.

Had some frustrating issues with the LCS so I decided to do something fun instead.
http://doctaotsu.deviantart.com/gallery/#T...rretea-Maygarth

Inspired by a tabletop game I played recently.

Possible City Master Prop

...I was thinking the same thing. The worst thing it was on special for a while and I totally spaced.

...that is pretty cool. I gotta get back to work with Hex, These competitions and challenges over at Daz are killing me. Currently doing one render as I speak for the PC Inspirations Contest (lots of intricate detail and reflectivity so taking it's own good time) and still working on elements for my first Stonemason Competition entry (may actually be doing this in Carrara).

BTW anyone else update to D|S 2.2 yet? Seems to have cured the Render bug I experienced but some of my previous scenes were a bit messed up and I had to reinstall Sadie.

Thanks KK! Hex is good times... it's a bit unstable but it's possible to get some decent results out of it if you baby it. I'm really mystified by smoothing but hopefully I'll figure it out at some point. Extrude and Edge are your friend.

If someone wants to skin it I'd be happy to try my hand at modeling a citymaster. I just need some direction as far as building it in such a way that it can be rigged in Poser or what not. I need to create the individual parts as discrete elements right? Wheels, doors, windows, etc? What kind of poly count are you looking for too?

<Update> Still looking for some decent shots of a Citymaster. Found a good side shot but I'll be winging it from there. Anyone have some linkage to a good 3/4 shot?

Alright this is what I have so far.
http://doctaotsu.deviantart.com/art/Ares-Citymaster-88151980

Lot of work... and no idea how well it'll skin either.

Alright, this is as done as it's getting tonight:
http://doctaotsu.deviantart.com/art/Ares-C...er-Mk2-88164484

You are way ahead of me on modeling it, but I can skin it. Not sure about rigging yet. Still working towards that.

Hell man, I'll keep modeling them if you guys keeps skinning them. I just need some direction as to what I can do with the meshes to make the skinning easier.

I like how the citymaster turned out but I'm not sure if the architecture is actually going to skin properly. I will probably need to hack bits off and re-weld them so I don't have a lot of overlapping geometry.

God, my hand hurts so bad, I wish I had a real computer table to work on.

Tomorrow I'm going to take a crack at either KK's drone or some of Biometal's guns (I want to do the gauss rifle but I'll settle for any of them really).

We need someone good at rigging now.

Let me know when you are ready to share the mesh and I will see what I can do.

I actually want to learn rigging next.

Texturing is hard, I don't have access to Photoshop, and I'm unwilling to learn GIMP at the moment.

But I think I'll focus on doing good meshes first

...actually Gimp isn't really all that hard. I've been pretty much winging it as I go. But yes, it is good to concentrate on one aspect at a time and designing meshes requires a lot of patience (and the Everfull Pot of Coffee artefact ).

Personally I'm a fan of Vault Zero but that's just I like to put on blue jumpsuits and pretend I'm saving the world.

*Boggles at how accurate that description is... creepy*

Doc and I have been working through the mesh. Wow.. Never realized some of the little rules for making a mesh portable... No poly can have more than four sides is a big one. I've worked up a couple of tires right now and an starting on a vehicle body... Weld by weld.

*Bows in shame for bad meshing*

I promise the Ares Predator mesh will be better!

I've got no room for bragging... At the moment I have two tires...

...someone on the Daz forums is working on an interesting design that I think has some very nice possibilities.

Citymaster?


DocWagon HTR variant?

This is a different project from the Sci Fi Truck offered on Renderosity.

http://doctaotsu.deviantart.com/art/Ares-P...-Mk3-3-88853363

Latest mesh... I've been really careful with this one so hopefully it'll actually be skinable.

We'll see.. I really need to learn Carerra.

Beats my earlier attempt, nicely done. Damn I need to make more time to work on 3d stuff.

...nice work.

That looks real nice. Looking forward to seeing the mesh. Will it be riggable?

It's already separate pieces so I assume it's riggable. I'd love to get it animated but eh... I'll wait till I get XSI before I start sweating rigging. You want to take a crack at skinning it?

Much better, but still a number of polys with more than four sides. Finished the trigger tonight. Working on the receiver next.

yeah I need to remember to use the "triangulate n-gon" button next time.

I just hate it because it makes my meshes so... ugly. Yick.

When I get back from leave in a couple of weeks I'm going to buy XSI... so hopefully my meshes will export even better.

...OK for everyone using Carrara found a link to a nice little freebie for the Neo Anarchist in us all...

Punk Hair

....this is new and comes complete with different texture MATs.

...and if you don't already have him...

The Freak Bundle 80% off

...but ya gotta hurry as it is only until midnight, Daz Time (MDT timezone)

Thanks for the heads up.. needed something to use this month's voucher on Well this should make for some troll fun soon as I get time back in my life.

...now all I need is She Freak.

[...for V4 that is.]

Ok, HERE is the Ares Predator Doc and I have been working on. Next step is to map the UVs then create a set of MAT files.

Looks pretty sweet, guys. Let me know if you need an help skinning these things. I'm pretty handy with Photoshop.

The V3 Fantasy poses from "Schlabber" included an Ares Predator I and a sort of Ares Predator II model, both from Questor I think. No skins though.

Here is a render I am working on for the characters in our OpenRPG Game.

Here is one I'm pretty proud of. This is my mage Joshua Noble, aka Simon Vindicre, aka PartyTime from the Project Infinity game. It took quite a while with all the lighting and such, but I think it turned out very well.

...pretty nice.

Sorry, been AWOL for a bit. Hellish work schedule, company moving across town (@$#&%! 1.5 hr commute each way by bus instead of 18 min by bike), and learning Carrara while trying to finish my Stonemason contest entry.

...and I'm back, vacation was well needed.

Thanks for getting that thing meshed man I know my models aren't spectacularly well built. Hopefully the new proggie I have will help with that.

I am still rendering with DAZ, no postwork with photoshop or gimp, so I aim to do all my effects with DAZ only. One can do a lot with it.

For "video-screens in a picture", I use the skin tab to reskin the screen with the picture I want - usually another render I did.

The "fog tool deluxe" or "Jepes Flames" can be used to get some "hazy" effects.

And there are all the construction kits that one can use a lot like lego bricks, to create "Models" in DAZ - like a bridge out of a few arches.

But I am doing mostly fantasy pictures lately, apart from illustrations for my ongoing SR campaign.

...the fog tool does some wonderful effects but be prepared for long render times. I tend to do minimal postwork for the most part. The most ever was in my pic of the X-Men's Jubilee only because without certain plug-ins it's impossible to get all the "sparkly" effects. Then you are adding a lot of lights which also crunches the render process.

oh, BTW not really an SR render (well sort of maybe as it is from Leela's backstory). Here is one of the latest I've done. It was supposed to be my first entry for the Stonemason contest but I posted a draft of it in another thread prior to the the contest rules being released so it was ineligible.

I call it Welcoming Committee

I've always liked the pic, the cats are cute.

HERE is a drone armed with a pair of Ingrams.

...saw that you entered it into the Daz PC Inspriations contest. Was wondering if you were going to. Still waiting for my M/O to clear so I can DL him and a host of other bots I got.

Doc, thank you very much. This pic is very close to me as It really captures Leela's innocent nature which she never outgrew. As I mentioned, it is a respite from all the darkness the Shadowrun world usually has to offer. I wish I could have entered it in the Daz Stonemason Contest for I think it would have held up well against the competition.

I certainly think it would have.

Any requests for drones to model? I'm finally getting something approaching a working understanding of XSI and I'm looking to try something new. My inclination is to do a steel lynx since that seems to be every riggers favorite virtual ride.

...Renraku Stormcloud. Those gasbags are everywhere and sooo bloody useful. Also the classic Rotodrone (armed with an LMG of course) would be nice.

...Violet would never be caught on a run without her trusty eggyweggy beater to cover her tush.