I like Duckie Wuckie, I hope nothing bad happens. This image in all of it's simplicity make me smile. You know somthing, this image needs nothing else. If you wanted to make ducky seem in peril. A sinister shadow falling on the floor and up the wall to the right would be all that you would need. The litte duck sitting so innocent in his pond sets 99 percent of the scene.

Errr, that is anemone, Double the number of tentacles, Make them milky translucent With just a hint of color and make the base half as tall and a little narrower, and you are pretty close.

He He, I just could not get the the color render to convey they right feel. Everything I did just made it worse. So I removed all color and the textures came alive. It ended up being closer to the effect I was looking for. So something that would have made a rather bad color rendering turns out to be much better in B&W. I have to be honest this was a happy accident not intended.

All you need is the silloette of a big Bat hanging from the top of the frame on the left had side. Don't even have to model it as all you need is a Identifiable silloette. A sort of Bats eye view. I think a good bat is available from Zygote if you wished to go the model route --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Open the control panel and select Multimedia devices, then click on devices and then video compression codecs. Make not of what you find there.

Sounds like you have a problem with your .AVI codec You need to go to your device manager, I am hoping you have windows. Select multimedia devices and check to see if your video compression codecs are installed. Especially the ones that are called Microsoft video 1 etc. Are you getting the error message right after you specify the file name as click save? If you are the poser is having trouble locating the video compression codec. The procedure for fixing this will require more information.

The left to right reflex is not only western. Even the Japanese and Chinese who write from top to bottom, also go from left to right. (top to bottom, left to right) In the western languages it is left to right, top to bottom. The closest thing that contradicts this is hebrew which still is read left to right, but youstart from what would appear to be the end of the book rather than the beginning. Yup, It really is a defiency in the Poser rendering and lighting system. As soon as you put a image into a good raytracing engine. A much more accurate image is possible. You are right the edited image portrays a tender or sorrowful emotion. But with the post processing there was only so much that could be done. There are many ways to portray emotion and ambiance in a image. Lighting is one. Color is another, focal point and perspective are more still. THis is actually a great thread as a tutorial, You should post a copy of the MAX rendered image here as well. It almost becomes a mini lesson in composition and lighting lesson for other inspiring artists. Because we discuss many of the subleties of image composition, lighting etc with actual examples of the different techniques. With the actual images included for the comparisons. I feel it is a pretty good resource. I look forward to seeing the latest incarnation.

Gabe remember your basic photography, The human eye is trained to read an image from left to right Dark to light. With that huge black void behind the character on the extreme right hand side of the image. The lighter area to the left of the figure (the slats or steps) was competeing for attention with the rest of the scene. By bring up and opening the shadows, Not lightening the entire frame. And getting rid of the huge black void. The character now is the focus of attention and not other elements in the scene. Also the skin tones are less orange and more natural. I added faint light rays streaming in over the characters shoulder so there is a indication of light coming in from that direction. If you were to photograph the scene, The highlight only from the characters shoulder would not be enough to force a underexposure to that extent for the rest of the scene. In order to get the detail on the face you would have to meter for the light in the shadows of the scene and would end up with totally overexposed highlights in the shoulders and washout of all detail in the arm. So the first image left you and others with the feeling that it was not quite right. You did not have overexposed highlights yet still had light enough to make out the downtruned face. That coupled with many totally black areas contributed to it. Are you trying to highlight your textureing and modeling skills or trying to create a good total image? You need to decide. If you are trying to do both then this may not be the image to do that with. As very dark and highly contrasty images tend to not be freindly to both objectives. The altered image is not as gloomy nor is it focusing strictly on your texturing skills. But as a image depicting a scene and a emotion it works rather well. If your intent was to have the viewer focus on the mans arm and not the pose or the scene, then I was completely offbase with the adjustment. Any way it was the easiest way for me to get my suggestions across.

Hmm, I know there are a lot of Byce tut sites out there. you may want to look through www.bryce-alive.net for mapping tutorials. essentially do is create a image map in photshop or paintshop with the engraving texture. You then create a alpha bump map from that image to simulate the tooling marks. You apply the map to the object like any other texture map. I'm not saying it will real easy but that is one way of doing it.

IF you port it over into lightwave via the LW plugin then full map and material animatiion is possible. With both procedurals, colors, maps, and just about anything else you can dream of.

The key with scaly animals is non uniformity escpecially in the facial features. This can only be accomplished by hand painting the pattern to fit the animals face. The next is lowering the contrast of the scale lines. Most scaled animals are the same color, there is no befining color seperating the scales so the seperation lines should be nearly the same color as the scales. Actulally, for the best effect the color map should only contain the various color subtleties. The scale pattern should be drawn and applied as a bump map. This would most closely replicate the true testure of the critter. Lots of work? sure! but the effects are worth it. Combine with a accurate specularity map and Wham you have a killer surface. aif you extracted the crosshatch pattern from your texture, and left the dragon with just you color scheme, then applied the crosshatch as a bump map you will see much more realistic results. Also you need to vary the scale frequency, size and shape over different parts of the bidy. This is critical especially on the head,

The fault is mainly with poser, No raytacing shadows, no ability to adjust shadow density. Your best bet is to port it over to at least Bryce where you have better control over lighting and at least get a raytrace renderer. For radiosity and caustics, well you need to go with MAX or Lightwave

The engraving can be done with a image map, alpha and bump.

Finally you can disable sunlight completely and use user created lighting to light the scene.