Something Pumeco and I can actually agree on. LOL. 

That video made me all misty-eyed. No joke. I'm tellin ya, Toyota trucks are beasts and they just don't know how to quit. If you've never owned one then you just won't understand until you do. After watchin that vid, and after the customs that I'm wantin to do to mine (check out tacoma world forums for some sweet custom mods), I know I'll be ready for whenever the zombie apocalypse gets here. LOL. 

(Click for a picture of my baby - from back when I was livin in FL for animation school)

I can't say the same for their cars tho. They just don't seem to have the same longevity that the trucks do. And with all these BS regulations requiring the electronic crap be added to them, those are the parts that cause the most problems. Like my O2 sensors, that the engine doesn't actually need to run, but the feds want them in there, and when they go bad they can cause a lot of other problems. And no, you couldn't pay me to even ride in a Prius, much less buy one. Electricity is for blenders and toaster ovens. Gas is for cars and trucks. I won't even use an electric mower. Maybe when they get some real power under their hoods and can run for more than 2 hours, I'll reconsider it. But probably not. 

And yes, I'm one of them rednecks that wants some trucknutz (google it) just cause they're hilarious to see, and cause I hate-hate-hate when people refer to their trucks as 'she'. lol. But I haven't been brave enough for that yet cause they can get you tickets. There's a case going right now about an old woman who took it to court over free speech violations, when she got a ticket for $400. Case is still pending. 

As for trade-ins, Tacomas are pretty hard to find used, at least around here. And when you do, it's likely at a Toyota dealer, from someone who traded for a newer model, cause many these days are all about the bling-bling, shiny and new. Pretty sure that was the case with mine. It took me a few weeks to find mine at a price I could afford and in a condition that I was happy with. You can check Kelley Blue Book and compaire their values with any other truck in the same age and class - Tacomas will always be the highest rated and highest valued, and KBB is known for being pretty accurate. My county uses it as one of their guages for annual property taxes (which is still around $225/yr for my 12 yr old truck). 

Oh, and my insurance is $29 a month - due in large part to it's safety rating. It's just liability but even full coverage would only cost me about $60. 

Hey Pumeco - you could always get a Robin! LOLOL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQh56geU0X8

I about died laughing watching that craziness. I didn't even realize this was a real car at first - if you can even call it a car. I thought it was some kind of experimental thing they did for that show, but nope, no experiment at all - just mental. At least folks in the US have enough common sense to make this special brand of stupid illegal in most places. Do you even have to wonder why? not to mention the designers obviously haven't grasped the basic laws of physics that deal with balance. But I must thank them for the high levels of humor learning about this wonder of design has brought to my day.

A 1980 Datson station wagon was my first car. My uncle gave it to me after he drove it for proly 15 years. It did run good but boy was it ugly as hell and embarrassing to drive. LOL. It's still parked in my parents backyard under another 10+ years of pine straw and who knows what living in it.

Actually my very first car was a 71 (or 2) 3-speed Rally Sport Camero, but I never got to drive it. When I got it, the gas tank was in the trunk and the mufler and some other parts in the back seat. It was white and rust. My dad got it for me as one of those father-son projects when I turned 15 and got my permit. But we never could get it to run for more than 5 or 10 minutes and even then it wasn't all that safe. And my dad is a mechanic most of his life. His front yard looks like a parking lot. Back when he was in his mid 20s, the county actually sent him a notice that if he bought and sold another vehicle he'd have to apply for a dealer's license. 

 

ANYWAY... now that this thread has been thuroughly hi-jacked. Sorry. Don't even know how it got side-tracked to cars but I'm just as guilty here for that one. 

 

I did want to say tho, back on topic - that one thing, which I meant to mention in a previous post - that bugs me about all the photo-realism and hi-res textures and such, is this: 

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/media/folder_11/file_507223.jpg

This example, from Wolf, isn't too bad, but it's not just the burned-in highlights that bug me (I don't see much of that in this image), but also the burned-in wrinkles and folds that wind up looking like scars or magic markers most of the time because they're just not natural-looking at all. I'm pointing specifically to the wrinkles in the forehead, and under the chin. Too many texture artists try using these lines instead of blending them out and creating displacement maps to create the folds in the skin, the way it should be done if you're aiming for realism. Those lines are created by the lighting in real life and how that light passes through the skin (sub-surface scatter), not the skin color itself. The skin will sometimes blend into a bit of a darker area around those wrinkles, but if you look in a mirror, and stretch out the wrinkles in your own forehead, you will usually see that the creases themselves, when flattened, are whiter than the rest of the skin around them.

You see this especially right along the creases of butt cheeks and thighs. Someone just posted a render of a Dawn character in another thread recently, where those butt-crease lines look like really bad surgery scars. They don't even follow the bends of the model in different poses, because those creases in real life are more shadow than anything else. It's horrible when used in textures and takes away from the realism in any image, regardless of how realistic the rest of the lighting and scene might look. 

And I think also this is one of the big reasons why older characters aren't seen very often, cause the few who do try doing older people, want to fill the faces and bodies with wrinkles, which wind up looking like the Carver (from Nip-Tuck) got hold of them. It's just bad looking. Let the wrinkles be created by displacement maps and lighting, not the texture itself. 

This is especially apparent in hand/finger textures, where the skin on the knuckles show all the wrinkles from the photo. Makes the hands look dirty like they've been diggin in things and places they shouldn't be diggin in. 

You can't just clone a skin from 3d.sk over a UV map and pass it off as photo real. Those skin photos need a lot of prep work to blend out highlights AND shadows, along with the specs of dirt and hairs and bits that are often found. 

That and these extremely flat, plastic doll ears. No two ears look exactly alike in real life - they are as unique as finger prints and irises, and yet every figure has the same perfect, volumeless ears that look more like deformed cookies stuck to the sides of a head. For those that do custom head sculpts, they should really pay more attention to the ears. 

Anyway, thats my rant on psuedo-photo real. Why I almost never buy pre-made skin textures/character sets cause it's so hard to find the ones that are done well with attention to detail.