Hello All, Well I have been working on my Bionicle dude. Ive got a few pics here, so Ill make a few posts. As youll see I am having some trouble with my terrains. Ive never used them much so far and....um...me thinks I need a little practice. But from the pictures youll get a pretty good idea of what I was going for. If anyone knows of any good terrain tutorials, let me know, or if you just have some advice on terrain creation. Oh and in one of those pics, yes, I know my landing platform-type structure is melting into my mountains....like i said, terrains...not so good at it (yet). And also the lighting...could be better. Right now all I'm using is sunlight. I welcome all suggestions. Cheers, H&B

Here's another angle

And another....

bionicle walking....

Bon voyage...:o)

Nice models. Material, lighting, renderer, and focus need some tweak work. Main character should get the focus and bury everything else to be able to see it better. It is hard to see it if it looks like everything else. My 2 cents :o)

Thanks Gweb, I agree with you comments. There is a lot of tweaking to be done. Right now I'm working on fixing up my terrain. I 'm also experimenting with using a night-time set-up to make better use of those light-posts I placed on that docking platform structure. Any technical hints you can give me concerning the renderer (or anything else actually) will be appreciated. Cheers, H&B

http://www.eovia.com/resources/carrara_tutorials/carrara_tutorials.asp The landscape tutorial is very good... Considering the scale of the Bionicle robots (if you are going for the toy scale that is), they would probably be shot using a 120-200mm lens, which would be placed at a rather short distance from them, thus giving a very small focal depth... So as GW said, a lot of things would have soft focus... Lighting: Try to get a little bit of frontal lighting as a fill light, just put a spot close to the camera and point it at the subject, give it a slightly wide half angle, and give it a nice soft angular and range fall off, and set its range lower (no need to have it affecting all the background stuff)... Key light should always come from the inside of the axis (not the camera axis, or the XYZ axes, but the axis of action, as in the direction the bionicle character is looking)... If you look at 3/4 portraits (look at Morgan Freeman on the cover of Se7en, it's a good example) the light is coming from the inside out (almost like a backlight, but you don't want it to be an actual backlight you rather want it to come slightly from the side(well in real life, as it would require flagging and stuff when taking a picture if it was an actual backlight to avoid flares))... But for you to see the entire figure, use a fill light as I talked about above, as it will remove a lot of nasty shadows (essential on character lighting, as hard shadows from noses and such, is frowned upon)... Looking good, I like the suitcase, keep up the good work... And don't get discourage from all the lighting stuff I wrote. ;)

Thanks for all the info. I appreciate it. At the moment Im rendering (on my desktop system, Im writing this on my old powerbook) a night-time scene. I added two other landing plateforms and a couple of lamp posts on the ground between the plateforms. On this attempt the only lights used are the ones actually in the scene, all the little lights on the plateforms etc. But afterwards i will play around with some lights using your suggestions. Cheers, H&B