Waitaminit.
That just gave me a brainstorm...

There's nothing to say I couldn't cast something and slice it up the same way and... and with a flat edge not have any problem calibrating the edges... all a casting is a real life object with inverted normals...

blinks

Holy god I think I just stumbled across a kickass idea.

Just so you know, this is half a bug torso. No, it's not just a blue turd. This does look a lot like what I hastily made, though it's lumpy. I'm going to need to score calibration into stuff (another reason clay will work a lot better).

Interestingly, you can actually see my finger indentations in it. There's somehting kinda cool about that somehow.
I suppose it will help if was better at modeling play-dough. I'm better with clay.

Yeah, seriously. They look obviously to be the same value.

But I do draw in pencil a lot so maybe my eyes are trained to see things for their actual value? I dunno. I can't remember before I could draw, so I don't remember how different things looked. I do recall at one point in my lifem ages ago now, when I learned to 'see' negative space, and how different that seemed. Now when I look at an image I do actually have to adjust to see the picture for what it is a representation of, not just a picture, if that makes sense. I see the shapes that represent the picture before I see the picture. I kind of live in drawing-mode now, and have for years. It does help my programming though.

I do know that when I get on a kick for a certain style, I start seeing things in the style. For instance, when I did a bout of ink stippling, I as seeing thigns in stippling. Not really, but like an almost-hallucination on the edge of my vision, like a really strong imagine-ation. Whatever the word is. When I started 3-D modelling it was really strange and made me a bit dizzy because I was imagining things from multiple sides and stuff.

Um...
What am I missing?
They aren't supposed to look the same shade?
They look the same shade to me.

Actually, the pic in question seems to have its bump-ness reducing as it fades up. For that effect, I'd load in an inverted leather seamless bumpmap to an alpha channel, then apply a gradient to it of black fading to transparentstraight down so the top becomes gradually darker (or jump into quick mask mode in the channel, apply a gradient to make a gadiated selection, then adjust levels so the contrast reduces and the image gets darker near the top).

Use this as the lighting effects texture channel. Then it might be possible to simply use a copy of this channel as the layer mask on the effect itself -- if not, use a plain gradient like mentioned above.

No worries.

BTW, the one restriction is that there has to be more than one dot if the dot is the first character. That is to say, 'renderosity.com' is fine, but doesn't get sent to www.renderosity.com. '.renderosity.com' is fine, and gets sent to www.renderosity.com and renderosity.com.

Just .com, however, is ignored, and treated as if SERVER_NAME was the setting. This is to prevent sharing of cookies between domains which is a security risk. If it wasn't disallowed, one could set a cookie for any .com domain, whcih would not only be bad, it would also slow down the Internet. B^)

Hmm. I have: a cakebox of blank CDs, a candlestick converted into a CD holder, ashtray, canister of Drum and skins, vegemite (covered), printouts of NURBS tutorials, sketches, keyboad, monitor, speaker satellites, soda bottlecapswebcam, printer, tweezers, cat toy, Gamma World 4th edition rules (must be an odd requirement), MP3 portable, pens, business cards (mine), KMFDM Cd, Intellivision Lives CDRom, umbrella and broadsword (leaned up against), notepaper, pen, eversharp pencil, 1 jewel box (cracked, empty) webcam, tablet, stylus -- wait, where's the stylus... Fuck I am gonna kill those cats.

Psychofish: You should read Otherland by Tad Williams. Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. Looks like I have to walk up to the deli and make some sketches soon, then finish it out with real deli stuff from memory, like 25 & 50 packets of cigarettes, meat pie warmers, &c!

Okay, so it looks like there's call here for cyberpunk stuff and deli stuff. Brings to mind, in the original (1st edition) Shadowrun RPG rules, the 'starter adventure' in the book was basically focused around the characters being in a Stuffer Shack (future cyberpunk deli) when it got robbed. There are a lot mentioned here I can't do (droids, clothing) unless someone else wants to build the parts into figures.

Attached Link: http://www.dodger.org/friv

Well, okay, but I've tried a zillion tutorials and it just doesn't seem to work for me. BTW, as far as text editing -- I recommend gvim (www.vim.org) as the best thing to edit stuff like this in. Beats out wordpad by a million miles. Gvim is one of the two standard UNIX programmers choices (eMacs being the other), but it's avilable for Windows too. And you can change your filetype before saving, so that it exports your carriage returns as n instead of rn, thus making it instantly mac compatible.