I just love making Toon content and I'm trying to release as much as I can in the marketplace. This thread will show off some of the stuff I'm working on or am close to releasing.

 

This first one are some items for the Toon Generation.... being part of a large medieval/fantasy knight bundle.

Here's one of the knights. Everything I do model is done in Hexagon 2.5 and mapped in ultimate Unwrap3D.

After that I create textures in DrawPlus 4. All of them are handmade either by painting or vector drawing. Then the models get imported into Poser and the textures are applied. Some models like the siege engine, have moving parts, they're added as morphs. Once that's done the model is added to the library as prop. For clothing the knight are a couple more steps involved, like rigging and transferring morphs.

Once done, the fun work starts, making nice images as this one!

Nice work. :)

How Cute!  Wish I had your imagination..

Thanks for the replies, I sometimes wish I had a little less imaginations and if I could share I would.... plenty of it to share. I guess having worked in the game industry before becoming a vendor here has helped a lot as well. Give me plenty of ideas to work on.

Here's my newest project... A.R.F. Based on an older models, but the body has completely been remodeled and so has the look.

 

For the vehicles, I started out with a base (top model) and adding items to it later on, like the turret and rocketpods (2nd from the top), but also many more things. From this base I modeled the APC (3rd from the top), it has a opening back door and can seat 6-8 people and 2 drivers. Added a small gun for defence. Then I took an older plane model and changed the shape, added air-intakes, rockets and fuselage and slowly it turned into a fighter plane (bottom model).

 

Create a camo textures, 3 variations, army, desert and grey for all the models and designed computer screens for the insight. UV mapped all the models and imported them into Poser Pro 2012.

Next, I faced with a decision, rig them, use base models with morph targets or use the new metadata props for Poser? Started with base models adding morphs targets to them, but that got to complicated. Decided to go with the new metadata props. Had to remodel some items, starting with the base model. Imported the new base model, then I imported the turret, pods and the rocket. Placed 8 rockets in the pod and parented each rocket to the pod. Used the joint editor to get the origen of the pods in the right place, so it will turn up and down correctly. After that I parented the pods to the turret and the turret to the base. Restricted some of the rotating and it works out well. Saved them to the library as props, using metadata and correcting some of the cr2's manually. Did about the same with the other vehicles, the fighter place and the apc.

 

By now, I've created complete vehicles as you see here, but also included all the seperate items so people can combine their own. The landscape is from my landscape pack and works nice with these models.

 

What they're shooting at? If you figure out what A.R.F. stands for you know, otherwise you have to wait until it arrives at one of my stores, shouldn't be too long.

 

By the way, my son thinks they're going to loose..... according to him they need a lot more fire power to defeat what they're up against :biggrin:

Is it time for the modified Nerf Dart gun yet??

Quote - Is it time for the modified Nerf Dart gun yet??

 

In real life almost.... one is going to arrive today and the other one should come tomorrow and hopefully the accessories will be here as well. For those of you have no clue what I'm we're talking about..... to bad for you :tongue2: Ok, only this time I'll share the secret. My son loves Nerfs and to make sure I'm not ending up a complete computer addict, I do play with him a couple of hours a week. He's getting older, so the more childish looking Nerfs are a thing from the past, he wants some more serious guns. I wanted to get him an airsoft gun, used to have one myself, but they're not allowed anymore. We've got some many restrictions these days, I couldn't believe it. If ever someone decided to go to war against us, they will easilu overrun our country, hardly anyone knows how to use a gun nad our youngsters sure don't have a clue about them. Anyway, no airsoft and such, so we have to stick to nerf dart guns, but no one said you can't modify those. We ordered 2 more realistic looking ones and we're going to modify those and add real equipment to them, like scopes, laser targeting, bipod and such, not the toy versions. Will take a while since he has to save up for all of it, but the first items arrive this week.

 

So, the rest of the week, modeling will be slow.... but don't worry, I've got more items lined up to show already Going to submit more items to the marketplace here, so I'll keep on posting those.

 

If your interested in getting my items, just follow the links in my signature once in a while to see if the show up in one or both of them.

Quote -  Going to submit more items to the marketplace here, so I'll keep on posting those.

 

I think 'Sketchbook' threads are cool, it's always nice to see work in progress, but is promoting your store appropriate in this forum? Isn't the Marketplace Showcase forum a better place to do that? Post your work, discuss your methods, but the "coming to a store near you" angle turns a sketchbook into an infomercial. 

Just sayin.

Personally, I'd rather see these types of thread here... I think if it's showing work in progress, the ideas stage, then that makes it fair enough... even if the end result of that work in progress is a market place product.

Once a product is finished, maybe that's the point to post an announcement, about the product launch, in this Marketplace Forum (that I keep hearing about - he he)?

But otherwise, seeing the "process" is something that any Poser user can surely gain something from, I think?

Especially since so many Poser users seem to aspire to make some sort of content of there own...

I feel exactly the same about the various other content makers who occasionally post some info about their product development here. I think it's good to see.

There's a lot posted here too that should probably, technically, be posted in the Poser Technical forum too, isn't there? I'm glad it's posted here though... makes it more interesting / diverse, topic-wise I think?

Quote - > Quote -  Going to submit more items to the marketplace here, so I'll keep on posting those.

 

I think 'Sketchbook' threads are cool, it's always nice to see work in progress, but is promoting your store appropriate in this forum? Isn't the Marketplace Showcase forum a better place to do that? Post your work, discuss your methods, but the "coming to a store near you" angle turns a sketchbook into an infomercial. 

Just sayin.

 

That's one way too look at it, sure...... just want to make sure that people know they can have these items if they want to. By the way, you better head over to the Marketplace Showcase. I'm not going to post direct links as others have done, but I will once in a while make people aware of the fact that they can enjoy the models in their own renders as well.

 

At some point, I may even do a whole image series showing how I model from start to finish. If you want to call this thread a infomercial fine..... then it serves a lot of purposes and personally I think that's cool.

Quote - But otherwise, seeing the "process" is something that any Poser user can surely gain something from, I think?

Absolutely! Work in Progress threads are often great learning resources for others, particularly when they generate "how did you do that?" type questions and discussions about tools. Posting screenshots of process and wireframes is always good, someone always learns something, sometimes it's the artist him/herself when someone offers constructuive criticism.

Quote -  ...... just want to make sure that people know they can have these items if they want to. 

 

Don't worry too much about that, people are surprisingly resourceful. If someone wants your stuff they'll click on your profile to check if you have a store, or they'll contact you to ask how they can get hold of it.

Lets face it, if you're a vendor making poser content, every person reading these forums is a potential customer. Does this mean that every thread in every forum is an appropriate platform to advertise your products? No it doesn't.

I think the forum rules say you may not promote marketplace products in this forum, I'm not sure, but it's not a good idea anyway, what if everyone did it?  

Imagine if 30 or 40 vendors all decided to start threads here about their latest pack of 200 new colours for some hairdo, bumping their threads every day to keep them at the top of the page to get the most hits. It would kill this forum, people wanting simple help would get pushed down the page so fast they'd never get an answer.

Quote - At some point, I may even do a whole image series showing how I model from start to finish. 

That would be excellent, I'm sure a lot of people would love to see that. Just avoid a "check in store for details" tone and it'll be a hit.

;-)

Here's the next item for the sketchbook.... my house :lol:

First I start out with cubes in Hexagon, arranging and sizing them to match the photo. As you can see, I'm not aiming for the same level of detail or an exact copy, but want my castle to roughly look like it. The roofs are also cubes, but by selecting the top face only and scaling that one down, you get the roof shape.

 

The little figure is important as well, it's used as a reference for the scale. In this case it's the toon generation figure from Poser.

If I'm happy with my rough castle, I select one of the cubes and go to the Surface Modeling tab and select Thickness. In the properties window I choose inside and set the value to 0.5 (that depends on the model). Press validate and now the cube is hollow, having walls. I do this with all of the cubes, but not the roofs, I don't want rooms in those.

Now I'm putting in the floors, which are again cubes. I've copied the character to make sure I get the floors on the correct height. Once the floors are in I place cubes, cilinders and even combines shapes at where the windows are going to be. These objects will cut out the windows in the cubes. That's what the image shows, but I've cut out the windows already. There are other methods to get windows, but in this models I use this method. If I have all the window objects in place, I do group them, a group for each cube. Then I select one of the cubes and select boolean operation and select the group of window shapes thatare to be cut out of the cube. Most likely you get a weird shape now. Do nothing, but go to the properties panels. You see a number of small icons, these represent what cuts what. Select the fourth one, called vol1 cut by vol2.

 

Now select the newly formed shape (should look like a cube with windows now) and look at the dynamic geomety panel. You see a little lightning icon there, press it and then press validate in the properties tab. Your shape is done.

Now do all of the cubes the same way and you should get the basic castle shape with window holes in it. One thing to do when using boolean operations is to save before you do it. Hexagon tends to crash at times. Save often and save incremental, so you can go back to a previous version if you need to or did something wrong.

 

I'm going to bed now, next time we'll continue.

here's the next step..... putting in windows and window frames as well as a door. Your model doesn't have these colors (yet), it's just showing what I'm doing a bit better. The frames are cubes. The  outside of the cube is a little bit larger then the window hole it will fit. The cube used to cut out the window hole in the frame, is of course a little bit smaller then your window hole. Select the frame, as in the image. Now go to the Surface Modeling tab and choose Chamfer. You will see the model change color and oyu can sellect edge lines now. Select the 4 edge lines as you see in the image, don't worry what happens to the model. Now go to the properties tab and change the radius, until you have the desired result and hit validate. Now you have to cut the inner cube through the outer cube using the boolean operation as we've done before.

 

Once that's done place all of the window frames where you want them. The windows themselves are just flattened cubes. As you can see in my castle, the frames stick out a bit and the windows are a bit back to get a nice effect. The door is made of a cube which has the top edges chamfered.

 

Just a note.... with this model we use a number of boolean operations. We do this because the model itself is not so detailed at all. If you create detailed models, you would use vertex modeling instead, but that's for another time perhaps.

The castle is done. For this castle, I'm going to use textures to get it nice looking, but if you want, you can add details to it.

 

Before getting the model into Poser, I need to make sure Poser knows where each texture goes. As you can see in the image all of the items have colors now. You first need to activate the material panel, it's in the selection menu. There may already be some materials, but most likely it's empty. If it's not empty remove the materials by selecting them and pressing the right mouse button and select remove. We're going to start from scratch.

 

In my material list, you will see names, that's how they're going to show up in the poser material room as well, so choose wisely and don't name them mat1, mat2, etc. You will have no clue later on what these are.

 

Let's start with the roofs/ Select one of them. Now press and hold the shift button and select the rest one by one. If you have them all selected, press new material in the material panel. Tada.... a new material shows up. Rename it and give it a nice red color. Go through this process until all of the objects have a material, us as much groups as you like.

 

Now your castle is ready...... Oh, you may have noticed I added another roof on the big building.

Sorry, something went wrong with the image, had to redo the post, so here's the one with the image......

 

The next step will be getting the castle uvmapped. That is basically telling each texture where and how it needs to go on a model. You can do this in Hexagon, but I really don't like doing it there, I prefer a uv mapping application for that for various reasons, for one it allows you to keep colors, instead of using textures. But for this tutorial, we'll do it in Hexagon.

 

But before we're going to uvmap, we need to do one more thing. If you will export this model as a wavefron obj for use in poser, Hexagon will most likely crash. We need prepare the model for export, by triangulating it. What that does in short is it divides the whole model in triangle shaped pieces, remove all hexagon special feature that other applications cannot use and converting them into triangles that all other applications can use. The model will still be what you've modeled, but you will see all kinds of lines on your mesh. Don't worry, when you render your model none of these traingles and lines show up. Not all items need to be triangulated. Hexagon will tell you if the object needs to be triangulated or not if you try to triangulate it, if it doesn't have need to, you will get a message. In this scene, the roofs and windows don't need to be triangulated. The buildings and the window frames need to be triangulated. Select all of those items and with all of them selected go to the Utilities Tab. Right under the word utilities is the icon we need, the one with the shape with 5 sides, dotted lines and blue points, the triangulate non planar facets option. Select it and a menu will appear and from the menu select the section icon, triangulate n-gons. If you need the first one or the second one depends on the modeling technique you used, but I will not go into details, for now it's enough to know that you need n-gons for this model. If all goes well, you will see all kinds of lines on your shapes. Now is a good time to use save as...... You may be one of the unlucky ones and have Hexagon crash when you try to triangulate n-gons, don't worry, just try again, not selecting all the window frames and buildings, but buildings only, triangulate and then try the window frames. At times when modeling you even need to do each part individually. At any rate, your model is ready for export, but still needs to be mapped.

 

Mapping is basically folding the model so it can be textured. We have a few options here. We can do the whole castle as one, or every object on it's own or use groups of objects. What ever you choose, the process will be the same, you just need to repeat the steps more times. for this tutorial we're going to do the whole model at once. Make sure you remove every object that's not supposed to be there, like I have the figures for measuring. Then press ctrl & a. Everything will be selected now. Go to the UV & Paint tab (see image). You will see a lot of options there. If you want to know what they all do you need to enroll the advanced class :biggrin: Just kidding, youtube may have some tutorials on that. For now we keep it simple. Since our whole model is made of cubes, it's logic we map our model as you would do with a cube. We're going to make 6 views of our model: top, bottom, front, back, left and right. Hexagon will do this for us..... now press the cube.... (see image) something odd will happen, suddenly there are tiles on out model, don't worry about that, it's supposed to be so. We now have a number of options in the property panel (see image) and this depends on how you're going to texture you model.  If you press what I've called 1, then you will get what image 1 shows, all of the views will be on top of each other. Press 2 and the top/bottom, the left/right and front/back will be on top of each other, but each getting their own space. Choose 3 and you will get a orderly layout of the model, clearly showing where to top, bottom, left and so on are. For now just choose 1 and press validate. Your model is now officially uvmapped.

 

When you're intending to do serious texturing work, you will use various options and most likely create groups of object which are uwmapped together. As stated before I don't use Hexagon's uvmapping options, I just save my model as is, without uvmap and do all of the mapping in an external application, called Ulitimate Unwrap 3D. It gives me much more control over my mapping. There are other applications you can uvmap in, it's up to you, some people do it all in Hexagon. Ultimate Unwrap 3D is just a left over from my game creation days, so I'm very familiar with it.

 

The model is ready to be exported for use in poser. Save the scene and select export choosing wavefront obj. Save it, but remember how what you named it and where you saved it. As soon as you've saved the model, a new window will pop up with many options. For Poser you only use Export Scale Factor and make sure only Export UVs and Export normals are selected, the rest I leave untouched, but make sure the Unit of the file is set to none. The export scale factor depends on how small or large you've modeled. Mine is set at 0.060 normally and 0.020 when using the toon generation. But, I can't look at your model and see how small or large you've modeled it. You have to figure this out by yourself and may need to export a couple of times to get it right in Poser. What you cannot do is scale the exported object in Poser to get the right size..... if you use morphs for opening doors and such, you will get into serious problems. You have to figure out what scale to use in Hexagon so it imports into poser at the correct size.

 

Once exported, we're done for now. Next time we'll going to import the figure into poser and add texture maps to it.

like the little toons attacking the castle

reminds of a game I had once;-)

Last bits and pieces..... Let's start with making some textures. You will need at least 3 textures, the rest you can do with colors. In windows paint or photoshop or gimp or whatever you use, create a texture for the wall, a wood texture and one for the roofs. For the wall I recommend one plain color. Save the textures somewhere, perhaps at the same place your model is? If you don't want to do textures that's OK, you can use Poser materials or just plain colors.

 

Start poser. Choose import, wavefront obj and a menu will appear. When you do models with morphs in it, make sure everything is deselcted, otherwise it will mess up your morphs. For this model, place on floor can be selected, the rest deselected. Press OK, locate your model and that's it. You should see it Poser now. If you've exported it at the right scale, it should be pretty big and you need to zoom out a lot to see the whole castle.

 

Now go to the material room. Select a material and you will notice that there's a texture connected to the Diffuse_Color and Specular_Color. Diffuse_Color will have colors you gave them in Hexagon. If you didn't create textures, just remove the attached texture and you're done. If you created textures, change the Diffuse_Color to white and point to the texture you've created. Do this for each material and your done.

 

Go back to the pose room, add a nice light set and hit render. You will get something line my attached image. If you haven't used a plain clor for the walls you will see they are a bit off and you will also notice that overal the texture are stretched out. This is due to way we've uvmapped the castle. It's all a bit rough, but for this tutorial it's fine. You can go back to Hexagon and uvmap each object on it's own, but if you're really serious about modeling, I do recommend using some kind of uvmapping application.

 

Well, that's it..... for this model. Next post I will show you what you can achieve if you fine tune the uvmaps.

Well, here's the fine tuned version of the castle. I added a number of details to the castle as well, to make it look a lot better. I've used the same modeling techniques for creating these extras.

Since I've made a hollow castle, there are a number of rooms in it. I made doorways for each room, so I could place a interior in it. Again using the same simple modeling techniques show, if you practice those, you can get some nice stuff.

These doorway lead to the towers.

Last one.... I know the exterior is nice, but not spectacular at all, but the castle isn't made to be used on it's own. If I add more models to it, the whole scene starts looking completely different from the outside. This way a simple model made with simple techniques can go a long way.

The complete castle also has a little chapel, again relying on the same modeling techniques, but through putting some effort into textures, the inside (outside as well) really looks nice.... at least in my opinion.

 

Good enough for now, got other things to do. Hope you enjoyed a little more insight into my crazy world of modeling.

I've been quite, but here's something I had much fun doing...... with vertex modeling you can create fun thing, but it sure is time consuming.

 

I started with the base car, my first try was a disaster, but the second try worked well. from the base car, the one in the foreground, I derived the other models.

Here are some images of the base. Started with creating a line. Extruded the line into the car body. The added all the details and lastly I smoothed the whole car. The rest is all texturing work to add more details.

Took a while, been working on illustrations for a book (check my gallery for it) and hadn't been modeling for a while. Good news is, I've found some time to work on a new project..... Troy. I've been wanting to do some more realistic content, so I'm giving it a try. As you can see from the image, I've modeled a fantasy outfit for a Troy soldier. From left to right you see the Trojan soldier, Trojan royal guard and a Trojan officer. Next week I'm going to work on a fantasy greek version and after that I do hope to model the city of Troy.... at least my version of it :-)

Hope you like it.... enjoy!

Quote - Took a while, been working on illustrations for a book (check my gallery for it) and hadn't been modeling for a while. Good news is, I've found some time to work on a new project..... Troy. I've been wanting to do some more realistic content, so I'm giving it a try. As you can see from the image, I've modeled a fantasy outfit for a Troy soldier. From left to right you see the Trojan soldier, Trojan royal guard and a Trojan officer. Next week I'm going to work on a fantasy greek version and after that I do hope to model the city of Troy.... at least my version of it :-)

Hope you like it.... enjoy!

Really cool look you have going there. If the city is anything like your castle, it ought to do really well.

Just watch out for the horse.

Thanks! Yes, we heard about that horse.... we're not going to fall for the same trick twice :lol:  As for the horse, I may model that one as well :blink:

Really Nice!!  You make this stuff look so easy.

Trojans don't like these guys..... they really spoil your day at the beach! In the front the greek soldier, in the back the officer.

Quote - Really Nice!!  You make this stuff look so easy.

Thanks.... I guess we both know it's easier said then done