Is there a tutorial out there to help us newbies do this? As you can tell from the post's that I have made that have characters in them, I am having a great deal of troble with this. In my previous post "Spider World" I love the back- ground and the green fog effects, but the spiders are too, I dont know, but they're just not right. I have tried to make a dragon with metaballs and I hve tried all sorts of other things but to no avail, so if anyone knows of a tut, please, HELP!!!!!

Look through the entries from this last challenge. Several people made characters out of metaballs. It is a tedious process but you get faster with practice. IN fact, the spider in my entry was metaballs...I took shortcuts on the legs but the body was pretty decent.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1160859

This is not exactly a tutorial, but ive posted a wire of a metaball character (front & side view). Perhaps it can give you some hints. Good luck.

Human WIP above Here are my pernese dragons http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=961438 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=902021 Seadragon http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=669186 Mostly depending on the character I'm working on I try to make the metaballs correspond to the muscles unless I can get away with using less. To make the character posable I create cylinders as the bones and set the origin points to the rotation point of the bone. In the case of my human character i've actually used a skeleton model as both the "bones" and guide for construction. The seadragons is just a series of balls along the spine, didn't need much muscle defintion. Search for Humorix's characters which are great too.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=307265&Start=1&Artist=Rayraz&ByArtist=Yes

One way of making your characters look more convincing is to add extra detail to the shape. If an arm looks like 'just a stretched sphere' it becomes less convincing. Adding extra shapes or details can make it look better. Booleans can also be used to get great shapes. And metaballs can produce great results too. Here are a few links to check out how I made some figures in bryce: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=155388&Start=37&Artist=Rayraz&ByArtist=Yes http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=155387&Start=37&Artist=Rayraz&ByArtist=Yes http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=307265&Start=1&Artist=Rayraz&ByArtist=Yes

Thanks for the responce's I really appreciate it. It juist gets so frustrating sometimes, I can draw what I want to make but i just cant make it happen with bryce. well trial and error I guess. I am going to make a link to this thread on my homepage in an artical so I have all these references, because they are falling off this page quick. Thanks again.