Attached Link: http://rex3d.net/mgriffey/waterFallTest7.avi

great house! Excellent model. 200mb in textures is way overkill. Im working on an animation project for a company right now in which 2 square miles of a city are modeled and textured and the textures all together are less than 50mbs (for 30 buildings or so). Its all about knowing how close the camera will get. You can lower the rez of most of your textures to 256x256 and lose no detail at that distance. If you are going to render interior scenes, only keep the hirez of the certain rooms that you will view up close. but great house! And it would be really cool to see it put together like you have showed us but in a sort of timelapse video thing. Kepp up the great work

wow...we have some sensitive people here. You shouldnt have to apologize at all Inca (although that is very classy of you). This is a public forum. If you post your work on this forum, you should be prepared to take some honest constructive criticism. How can you progress in this hobby of yours Phil, unless you can listen to what other people think about your work? He was only trying to help improve a model that he thought had a lot of potential.

i have to agree with the others...the foreground is far too busy. Distracts the eyes. There needs to be more color in the sky...try some desaturated oranges and reds maybe. And sorry, but I find that glow effect WAY too much. Its a very common and overdone effect today, if you are looking at Rochr's pics for inspiration (which is a great idea because he is a phenomenal artist) notice how his effect is subtly done. Its never too much. And Im not too sure what the focus is? Is it the foreground ships passing by? I guess what Im saying is my eyes dont know where to go. That may just be me though. Another thought too without ditching the balcony is to bring the cam closer to the edge. Like you are a person leaning out over the railing and admiring those wonderful looking buildings (buildings look really nice BTW). I think if you did that and changed the balcony color to a warm stone material or something along those lines this picture would really be getting there. Keep up the work, its looking good so far!

yes, Maya does help...it helped me SOOOO much. I love the program. I dont know where your area of interest is but I can offer a bit of advice and that is to try to learn both Max and Maya as much as you can. If what you want to do is closely related to what I do (pre viz work), youll want some hardcore Max skills (from what Ive found its probably about 85% Max in my field). But I still love Maya and will always use it even if I cant use it professionally right now.

"This is the single most limiting feature of Bryce in my opinion. I mean, how hard could it be to put in a boolean export feature? They already have the polygon calculations built into Bryce; they need this in order to render things. They should have a "render to .3ds" or something of that sort =)" Because, this is a render trick in Bryce, it doesnt actually change the objects geometry. Byrce needs to fix that first. Although, if in Bryce 6, booleans are the only way to change/sculpt a polygonal object, Ill give up on the program forever. (Bryce 6 better have basic modeling tools)...can be very basic but it must have them at some level

"I was only really describing the job market in general, from what you find posted for good money ($85K is an average starting point for Maya work)" 85k/per year? Is that what you meant? Because that is VERY rare that you would make that much unless you are a a big time MEL scripter. Especially hard to make that kinda of money as an entry level employee. Lead character animators at big companies such as EA (or insert other large comapany's name here) make around $70k/yr or maybe slighty more but that is the upper echelon. It is possible to make that much, but pretty rare, you have to realize how saturated the job market is for cg artists, companies can always get people for cheaper than that. But maybe Im misunderstanding what you are saying. If you are making that much money, put in a good word for me, i'd move anywhere in the world for that kinda cash ;-) on another note, is Rhino easy to get into? I've heard that it is a very easy program to get the hang of. Its one Ive always wanted to play around with

originally posted by LordStormDragon: " Aye, there are three apps being used in "the Field" these days... 1. 3DStudio Max 2. Maya 3. Photoshop" dont forget Lightwave (used for animation quite a bit), Rhino which is quite possible the best nurbs modeling app out there, xsi which has amazing poly tools and zbrush (huge in games now) just to name a few. But those are definately the 2 biggest 3d software programs used now by far. And I must concur, I do love Maya :-), although they NEED to upgrade their poly modeling tools...right now they are pretty lame and do no good when trying to professionally model. Im getting back into Max full time professionally now and I hate to say it but Im starting to really love that program again (although animating in it is pretty lame).

Flak, I can probably answer that for LSD. It looks all poly...that curvy bit (im guessing you are refering to the stair case hand rail) could also be nurbs or sub-D..either way can be converted easily into poly But Im not positive that the screenshot is only poly

"How would I make sure people to actually pay me? I've lost hunderds of hours of work over some project that promised me hunderds, possibly thousands (up to $10K) of dollars (depending on the success of the project) but I haven't seen a penny yet :-/"

Rayraz,

I know this is not a quetion directed at me, but there are a couple ways to do this. One, was mentioned by AS and that is to get paid in advance or atleast half of the total price in advance and the other half on delivery of product. The second would be to write out a contract. You can read up on how to do this or find someone who knows. Customize the contract to each individual job and make sure its all signed and legit before starting work. That way they have no choice but to pay you. I, myself just graduated from art school and am currently working on freelance and contract jobs so Im starting to learn first hand how this real-world business works :-)

Matt

Message edited on: 05/01/2005 07:19

pakled,

actually the myth was that daddy long legs are among the most deadliest spiders in the world or something like that but its teeth or mandibles are too small to pierce enough layers of human skin to inject its poison.

It is all false actually. Their bite, which can penetrate human skin contains very little and mild toxicity (will make the bite area sting abit, thats about all). So fortunately, nothing to worry about the most common spider in North America ...last time I checked anyways :-)

Message edited on: 04/16/2005 22:10

Im not sure i can offer any advice. But I tried to reconstruct your main towers in Maya. If you'd like I can export them as obj and you can try to import them into Bryce? it might work...worth a shot maybe. If i leave them unsmoothed, they are pretty low-poly...so it may cut down on the overall scene size and Bryce might be able to handle it

Message edited on: 03/21/2005 15:38

Message edited on: 03/21/2005 15:39

that was you ICM?? i commented on your image, didnt realize it was the same ICM as in the Bryce Forum. But just to restate what I posted, be proud of the fact that you hit the front page even though there are a few technical things to fix with your image. For a first try at matte painting??!? thats really good

that really sucks about the third button on the mouse thingy. I would say either uninstall/reinstall Maya or you can customize your key and mouse configurations. The middle mouse button is pretty important since that is how you navigate around the viewport. Although it is not needed for the Ocean example...you can simply right click and choose import "oceanshader.ma" into scene or whatever it says. But, I have sent you the maya binary file (mb) to your email. And feel free to plagarize...I honestly did nothing original with it. So have fun working with it. Let me know if you have any questions

oh and sorry....no need for mental ray for those renders...in fact i turned off raytracing for the animation which doesnt change the look at all unless you need to see reflections in the water