Cerbera

Ah the classic catenary arch :) It's a nice setup - thanks for sharing ! CBR

Thanks Thomas. Couldn't agree with you more about the far distance. Did a bit of editing to get some orange into those clouds, and made the rear mountains sit into the sky better by feathering the alpha slightly... I quite like the lighter blue of the clouds but have dialled it back a little - perhaps not far enough though... So, any better ? Am working on another scene for the series, so I'll pop that up when it's looking half decent... CBR

Sounds good to me, and I'm up for making some models in between other projects... CBR

Oh, you don't get alerted when someone wants to start a club ?!

If you can activate his club, you go for it !! But I bet you're as puny as me in this instance ;)

Yeah, you need admin for that - my moderation powers are insufficient for club approval ! :)

The clubs functionality we have here is quick and easy enough that you could just start one and see who joins ! CBR

I do like that fat little robin :) Textures working very nicely too, although I also liked the matte 'no reflection' versions you had the first time you rendered him... CBR

Indeed - you can never have enough HDRI's - thanks for the share :) CBR

Ha, I noticed that too - no - it's not people - it's a random texture thing that sort of looks like it might be :) I agree with you about the sky behind the far-most mountains, but am also struggling to know what exactly is wrong about it ! Also - good spot there, @digitvisions - you are correct that there is no reflectance at all in this image ! I had convinced myself that the mountain rock didn't need any, but of course the snow does, doesn't it ? :) I do have a fresnel multiplied with my terrain mask in a luminance channel going on - I had hoped that would compensate, but perhaps not, or maybe just not enough... CBR

Ha ha - that's my band's Christmas outing this year too :) And yep - I'll be on maximum helmet scan mode on the day :)

Ha ha - yeah at those prices I treated myself to the face hugger one just for the joy of watching him do it :) CBR

Inspired by that masterful Eric Smit landscaping lecture I re-posted the other day I have been playing around with mountains and terrain masking to see if I can get a vaguely convincing result in the terrain department. I'm going to do a few images in this series, but here's the first. Physical sky (fog, atmosphere, sky, sun channels, no GI) is doing the lighting, but sky later swapped out for photo. 20 minute render. You can tell me if I'm winning or not - happy to hear all suggestions for improvements in the next round... CBR

Hey Cafe Felt like a 1-night modelling challenge, and whenever I'm in one of those moods I always find myself looking at Star Wars Helmets. I've already done DV and stormtrooper helms, but another one high on my list of things to try is the Emperor's Royal Guard. Their helmets don't look that difficult initially, but there are definitely a few 'gotchas' once you get into the details and curves of it. However I emerged largely victorious with 100% quads, a minimal 674 polys and no complex poles. Having thrown a highly enjoyable 4 hours at it so far, this is what I've got... CBR

I quite like tuts from cmiVFX. They tend to be high end, very thorough, and usually show complete processes from start to finish. It's not often you get 70% off anything, but cmiVFX.com are doing just that for another 4 days, or the first 100 orders, whichever is sooner, using the code 4DayHalloween70. https://cmivfx.com So just sharing that in case anyone here would find them useful... CBR

Ah, I thought I could see an ngon in the center of your forward hole, but it may just be angle of the screenshot... if there truly aren't any ngons, then that's a very good thing... Not really. These are the sort of skills you only learn over years of doing it every day, and just can't be covered properly in a forum thread... However I could elaborate a bit more if I get time later today to show you how that mesh should look... If you want to improve your modelling skills, you could do a lot worse than to enter mine and @VECTOR's SDS elite modelling challenges which are running for the rest of this year and beyond (see clubs). CBR

Well, whilst it's 'OK' for someone who has just started modelling, there are a lot of problems, and it is breaking most of the cardinal rules of SDS poly modelling :) 1. There are ngons (polys of more than 4 sides), and there is no reason to tolerate a single one of these, which should be considered true modelling mistakes and eliminated / solved to quads. Even if these do not lead to shading errors in the render it is still bad technique to leave them unfixed. Other modellers cannot respect people who leave ngons in their meshes ;) 2. There are triangles, which also don't need to be there. A lot of the art of SDS modelling involves solving all triangles to quads. 3. Complex poles (more than 5 edges converging on a single point) cause shading errors if they are not on perfectly flat surfaces, and even when they are on flat surfaces, are still technically considered bad technique. You have a massive one of those in the middle of your model that should be replaced by a quad patch ideally. 4. Edge flow - this mesh doesn't really have a considered edge flow, so your polys look messy and random and not thought out. 5. Uneven poly sizes / unnecessary edges. This model suffers from that problem too - there are edges where we don't need them, and some wildly variant polygon sizes, which we should aim to minimize in good quality modelling... 6. Uneven circular point distribution - you can't get a flawless cylinder shape under SDS if you don't have nice even segmentation to its surrounding topology. Note the pinching on your forward hole as a perfect example of this... 7. Reference matching. This isn't going very well either - you are missing some of the defining features and curves in your reference pics, most notably the center section and gentle dome of the yellow top cover, and the interesting bulges / ridges in the metal box underneath it. But all that said, I have ludicrously high modelling standards, and it renders OK, so can't be considered a total failure. Hope that helps. CBR

Thanks for posting these - very helpful... CBR

Lovely job ! That's a great little dragon you got there :) CBR

Not that I wish to subvert the thread, but talking of features and stability, how are you guys getting on with making OpenSubdiv work with UVs ?! CBR

I like that. And couldn't help wondering how cool it would look used as displacement ;)

The key for me is to root your hard surface designs in reality. Whether it exists or not, there will be principles that apply. Designs have to make logical sense, to look like some effort has been put into their design, and that every part has a reason to be where it is and also has a design and manufacturing story behind it. This is quite difficult to do if you are modelling on-the-fly with no reference material or story behind your creation, so most people find it useful to have a good solid idea, drawings, sketches and a ton of photo reference before they actually start modelling in 3D. However, when you are just doing modelling practice, to get your skills up to scratch, none of that applies, and you can freewheel along quite nicely making random greeble style hard surface elements that you can use or adapt for later designs. That's why I recommended Arrimus, even though he is in 3DS Max - nobody is better at improvising hard surface shapes on the fly than that guy :) CBR

Oh, and I should mention videos 3, 4 and 5 in this excellent series by Christophe Doe. CBR

There are a ton of good tutorials out there on hard surface modelling. One of my favourite series is this one, which is quite old, but goes over a lot of basic techniques. But as you are in R18, you should also watch a decent tut on the new knife tools in that version as well. But you shouldn't limit yourself to just C4D tutorials. Once you are well familiar with Cinema's modelling toolset you can also learn a lot from people working in other programs - I like Arrimus in 3DS Max, whose hard surface skills are top notch. While it's good to watch tutorials initially, the fastest way to increase your skills is by actually getting in there and doing it, every day, until the techniques become second nature. CBR

That's not the only secret thing hidden in Cinema - around Easter you can have Easter Eggs as your material previews, and there used to be a Christmas tree that turned up on Xmas day... although I don't think that's in later versions - they may have stopped that just after R9. CBR