Quote - My first character I invented when Iw as about 5 yrs old and she was a pirate girl.

then when I started reading superman and batman I invented others.

Love esther

I am going to check out your online comic a bit later. My connection is acting up. It's a usb broadband, but the weather here is really bad, so my connection suffers.  

That was actually Poser 7 Sydney in the force. In fact, she is in almost all of those animations.

I haven't tried the BB envirsphere because I can't purchase anything for this beyond the program. Spouse made me promise not to.

And yeah, that guy had a death wish obviously. I just used that animation because it had the sudden fall at the end. I guess I could have deleted the first 80 frames, but I got lazy...

Pretty sure I did. I had two guys that I mostly worked with. Green Lightning was a teenager with super powers. I never did flesh out his origin, but he lived in a floating fortress and had a lot of really cool vehicles. He could fly and of course his other powers were based off his name...

The other is Red Devil. Seems I am into color based heros. Don't know what that means... But the devil was a scientist who was created in a lab explosion. I may change his origin because it's kind of cliche'd now. He was living fire. I created him from a drawing I did based on some old 20's and 30's Sci Fi paintings and book covers.

One of them will come to life one day. Just a matter of when.

I would use the Poser characters simply because it's going to be quite awhile before I can make my own characters. But I would want to make my own clothing/props/what-not in order to tell the story. I do have a couple superhero type characters that I made up as a teen. I just need to sit down and write a really good story to tell with them.

Did you, by chance take a look at any of the other animations that I did on YouTube? They are all geared toward telling a superhero type story...

Quote - and then are you going to make a flash story?

Love esther

I am not leaning toward it. I would rather do my own character. The idea for doing the Flash was just so I could figure out how to do the motion blur. I wouldn't know where to take a Flash story that hasn't been done.

Oh, and by the way: the specifics...

That's Poser 7 Simon as Barry West, aka The Flash. The background is just a pic I found on the internet. I've used it before as a background for Sydney when I was learning how to do dynamic clothing. As stated, the costume is just a painted texture map. I used Simon's body tex to do that with. The logo on his chest was downloaded from google, resized and added in. I used GIMP to match the color of the logo to make his costume so it would blend seamlessly.

I just did Walk Designer, tweaked it to mimic the comic book Flash, then rendered it to image files. I discovered that PNG files only contain what you render into the scene, so in effect, there is no background unless you add one in. Makes doing chroma key type stuff really easy, and things like strand based hair blends into the scene without artifacts and such. So I do most of my work post render with GIMP. If anyone wants it, I will post a tutorial on my workflow, since it's a bit unorthadox.

Quote - wow, that looks good.  did you use macfilters for the motion blurring?

Love esther

PS I thought the tails of the MB could have been a bit longer.

Actually, I used GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open source image editor. It's pretty versatile. I render the animation as a PNG image file, so I can do the visual effects a frame at a time. I thought the tails could be longer too, and I was going to see about maybe speeding the animation up a bit, to give it a look similar to Smallville, or the short-lived Flash tv series. But that will be after I figure out Blender and can make a decent costume.

Quote - Wait untill you get a email from yourself offering cheap viagra like I did.

I have. Now I am wondering where I got the viagra from? Yahoo is terrible for this.  I have my yahoo filters set up so that if it's not addressed directly to me, it goes in the spam folder. It's cut down over the years, I still get two or three a day, but in the beginning, it was more like 230 per day.

And amazingly enough, I am still seeing the email from Nigerians who have 30 million in cash they want to give me if I just give them my bank account numbers...

Another route is to use real smoke and flames. If you don't mind doing it post, check out Detonation Films dot com. They have a lot of free stuff that is already chroma keyed and works pretty good.

Quote - Thank You! It is my belief that ANYONE can do what I've done. I do not consider myself an animator. I was just doing primarily archviz stills with the occasional fly-through. Nearly everything in this short was learned within three years. I came up with the idea at Thansgiving '07, wrote the script (actually wrote and rewrote) early in '08 and started acquiring assets during the summer of '08 and altering them Chris Orwell - Chrislenn from here at Renderosity - created the characters during the Spring of '08. I spent about a year working on creating the sets and control panels and character rigs.

I believe that anyone can do what I did - the most important ingredients are Persistence and Determination!

I have only been working with Poser 8, GIMP and Magix Movie Edit Pro for about a year. I have some stuff on YouTube, but it's nothing compared to your work. I am just at the stage where I am starting to like my renders. I do mostly rendering to image files and put them together in Virtual Dub. I use Magix for dubbing the soundtrack. I do have a leg up there. One of my other hobbies is home recording...

I was thoroughly impressed. You have set a bench mark for what I am aiming for. Of course, I have a looooong way to get where you are. I still have to learn so much. But now I see that it is possible with the right time and direction to make a viewable rendered movie.

My hat is off to you, and I look forward to seeing more, if the muse grabs you.

Quote - You could use a ball to endcap the openings.
With the morphtool and some textures-displacement, it could work.
Or, open the exported arm hand-fingers obj in a 3D app, and close the remaining gap?
You'd still need some trick to close the gap on the collar :-)

I did something similar to this, doing the old lightsaber cutting off the forearm trick. Camera angle and the clothing hid the missing parts. I also did the duplicate character thing. Makes the render drag out a bit, though.

Quote - Rokket, there are a lot of aspects that need considering when you start down the "natural-looking" path. BB's approach has a lot of merit - since nature has laws and those laws should not be disobeyed in art without a good reason - his method of using natural/physical characteristics of real materials that can be expressed in a maths formula will yield much more natural, believeable objects that the more common approach of randomly plugging nodes together until a desired effect is produced under that particular light set, with all that implies.

But there is more to creating "natural-looking" than just believeable materials. Figures with presence, for instance. The typical catatonic look in so many of Poser characters in the galleries strains that believeablility even when the textures are perfect, the shadows spot-on, and the lighting to die for. KobaltKween gave sage advice when she suggested looking at photographs (of your target scene setting, for example) to use as reference. You are the viewer: the figures in your scene are living their life, enjoying their moments, and you are capturing that.

I belive I mentioned the posing and expressions in my last post. But I am still learning how to use shaders. I am not randomly plugging nodes together because I don't know how to do much of that yet. About all I've managed to do so far is change the skin tone on Sydney. I am not a fan of the pasty white skin on a lot of the models, so I changed hers to suit me. I also don't like the catatonic, mannequin look. I tend to spend a lot of time, swithing between camera views, tweaking this, changing that, until I get the emotion I am trying to convey. I recently messed around with an animation where I had her doing a little dance, keeping her face turned toward her perceived audience, and having her expression change as she went along. I learned how to use the "point at" feature. It worked pretty well, but I still had to tweak it when she lifted her head.

All in all, I am thinking one more year with the program and I will have learned enough to start doing my movie. Right now, I am certain I don't have a clue what I am doing, and most good results are accidental, and non-repeatable.

Quote - We're not at all sure that the OP actually meant photorealism as rokket hasn't returned.

However, if you want to mimic what we're used to seeing in photos, then DoF is more than a matter of taste. Apparently you've never heard of the almost rabid quest for "bokeh" among photography enthusiasts and pros. This is the pleasing smoothness associated with the out-of-focus areas produced by the best, most expensive lenses. Google bokeh.  It's fascinating.

This is bad bokeh.

Submit this to a photography forum and you'll get slammed immediately, ten times worse than around here for lack of good shader work.

BB, being a mariner makes it hard for me to be on regularily. And since it looks like I started a big stink, perhaps I should explain what I am trying to do, and what I meant when I posted. I think photo realism was the wrong word. What I am trying to do is achieve a "look" to my renders and eventual animations that is beyond, or away if you will, from the look of other 3D animations. I don't want the cartoon look of the characters in most of the Pixar films, for instance. And I don't want the washed-out, colorless look of the Final Fantasy film.

I am not trying to get a render that looks like I took it with a camera. I am trying to get a render that looks like it has life. I believe the pose is the base for this. Which is what I am working on now. I too, have noticed a lot of renders that obviously took a lot of time, and the character looks like an expensive manequin. That's what I am trying to get beyond. So when I do start rendering animations, the characters move naturally, not stiff. Not floating.

So I think I should have titled this thread "Natural looking renders", not photo realistic.

Quote - Well, you mentioned no mo-cap.  Are you an animator?  The reason I'm asking is because you may already have heard about the uncanny valley.

As for AO.  It needs to be tweaked according to your model's material settings.  Some materials look better with AO.

Yes.  Some creations are never finished for some of us.

I am not a professional animator, no. I am just a novice who bought Poser 8 a year ago, and I am learning as I go. I am acutely aware that AO needs to be tweeked. I am still messing with it. I have noticed that a lot of the conforming clothing and such doesn't look right in AO.

And I have 1300 renders that I keep looking at and thinking "I should have done this... I should have done that..."