Wallpaper Wips


Monk said:
Tripmonkey_uk said:
amf66 said:
What I want to know is why there's a squirrel in the one with the Christmas tree!
Who cares? the squirrel rocks :D


You guys even NOTICED there was a squirrel? :lol:

He's there because he wants to be. It's cold outside, and he came in with the tree. Tho I could have made him toonier, I just liked the idea of having a squirrel in there, holding his nuts...

...Sorry I'm not around much at the moment, I overdid things and I'm paying for it in pain levels, so I'm trying to back off a bit, rest the head/nose more.
I just thought the squirrel was there to fend off the damn chipmunks ;)

Sucks that your still not feeling much better Monk. Get your head down or relax in front of a nice warm fire with some covers over you; always works for me.
Hope you start feeling better soon. It's crap being ill at any time but Xmas just seems to make it even worse some how :(
 
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I know what you mean. Fresh antibiotics and painkillers from the quacks today, and I'll rest as well as I can while looking after my don (the mrs is out at work today).

So we get to watch lots of juvenile telly and let him beat me up at worms. Yehar!
 
Monk said:
You guys even NOTICED there was a squirrel? :lol:
What do you expect? I noticed those straps, even though I must have seen the picture a dozen times already. There's something about that one that makes you want to take another look... preferably from a different angle :D

Anyway, how did you miss them? Isn't the top a single model?
 
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Mr.Confuzed said:
Anyway, how did you miss them? Isn't the top a single model?


All the (rendered) images are compiled into one multi-layer file with a (currently single colour) background. I make specific layers visible or invisible prior to sizing down to a specific size, and on that one occasion I neglected to hide one layer that had the lcothing rendered on. My bad :(

So it was always rendered "correctly", it was just producing the final image for upload where I goofed. :(
 
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Monk, hope you feel better. I've downloaded your larger renders and enjoyed them. Sorry I haven't been around as much, trying to get a couple projects of my own done before school starts up again and my soul is lost in that venture. :-b
 
No worries mate - life has a tendency of happening to people.

WIP#1 of "Pandora Island". I keep being tempted to try and put a prehistoric critter in the water but IMHO that might just spoil it, as it would lean the image in a particluar direction. Ditto to the "naked chick on the beach" idea (even though she'd be too teeny tiny to make out any details).

2hxlent.png


Ta,
 
Haha, oh nice.
It looks very man-made. A hint by an ancient civilization?
Or, if it's messier, nature itself anticipates it.
 
Monk said:
No worries mate - life has a tendency of happening to people.

WIP#1 of "Pandora Island". I keep being tempted to try and put a prehistoric critter in the water but IMHO that might just spoil it, as it would lean the image in a particluar direction. Ditto to the "naked chick on the beach" idea (even though she'd be too teeny tiny to make out any details).

Damn, the complexity :blink: very well done.

But what about the water? Looks kinda... non-transparent?
 
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haha! love the Island! I have always found gargling a nice single malt scotch to do the trick. really clears the head... plus it's delicious and after a couple glasses you don't care that you are sick anymore. I too have been away a lot lately building a custom rom for the moto droid. :p It has turned out to be more of a pain in the butt than I anticipated. but I have android running great on my beagleboard so I can't wait to port it over to the pandora!

Feel better monk!
 
Vlynndar said:
Haha, oh nice.
It looks very man-made. A hint by an ancient civilization?
Or, if it's messier, nature itself anticipates it.


Ever watched the TV show "Lost", and wondered about their island? Well, I think Pandora Island is a bit mystical, a bit mysterious, and I wouldn't like to say if it's man-made, natural or... otherworldly!

dflemstr said:
Damn, the complexity :blink: very well done.

This is where I tend to shoot myself in the foot with "standing on the shoulders of giants" type comments, so let's see if I can rephrase it to have a little more obvious ego.

I remember well the early days of POV-Ray 3, when everything I produced on screen, every triangle, every vertex, has been defined by me specifically, by something I had typed in (no GUI back then at all, you see). That was hard work, and using that level of software I did some things that made me very pleased, but I could never have hoped to achieve the complexity of what one can accomplish with modern software.

Nor do I consider modern software (or models) to be "cheating" - they are all just the tools one puts in to make the artwork. I've never seen Terry Pratchett criticised for using a Word Processor instead of writing everything out in pencil, nor any other author for that matter. Tools are just tools - and they help you to create the image, or story, or message of whatever sort. It's really great. this image is created in Vue 6 Infinite - like much of my software it's a couple of years out of date (but then, with my hardware having been playing up I'm hardly going to keep shelling out for expensive software to fail to run reliably, am I?). It's probably not that difficlt to do as well if not better with the current free version at:

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_8_pioneer/

but I haven't tried anything more recent than my version 6, so I can't say for sure what these "Pioneer" versions are like.

dflemstr said:
But what about the water? Looks kinda... non-transparent?

It bothered me too, which is why this is officially a "WIP" and not a "Done", but the water is actually quite transparent, as I hope this animation shows (the frames are generated by mixing a render + water, as before, with a new render without water. The water layer is at 100% opacity, then 75%, 50%, 255 then not visible at all).

1ormf9.gif


The problems seem to really be:

1. Not enough under-water detail (e.g. fish, people, monsters) to illustrate that it's water.

2. Not enough depth to the water, to put such details in.

The island is quite deliberately the focus of the scene, and it may be that I've made a mistake in focussing on the island too closely and not building enough around it - if it were a smaller part of the scene itself then there might be more surrounding to give the island greater credibility. Then again, it was actually modelled in part after a wonderful beach in Southern Spain that I literally loved as a child, and is purposefully shallow well beyond camera range - there is no "depth" to put anything significant into. Maybe I could produce a small school of fish, I'll have to think about it, but it's really shallow - ought to be GORGEOUS to play in :)

I've still got some thinking to do and more experimenting with the lighting at least, I suspect, before I'm certain I'll call it done - and maybe (MAYBE) I'll try redoing it with less foxus on the logo in order to try and get greater depth to the water (which would let me put more detail offshore) but, well, it's a trade off between my time and effort and the time before ED calls "halt" on Wallpaper submissions, as they'll have to decide at some stage or other I'd have thought, before the beastie starts shipping.

DuckMan said:
haha! love the Island! I have always found gargling a nice single malt scotch to do the trick. really clears the head... plus it's delicious and after a couple glasses you don't care that you are sick anymore. I too have been away a lot lately building a custom rom for the moto droid. :p It has turned out to be more of a pain in the butt than I anticipated. but I have android running great on my beagleboard so I can't wait to port it over to the pandora!

Feel better monk!


My preferences is for a "Souther Comfort" variation on the 2Hot Toddy" theme, but alas with the insides of my nose having been cut and burnt out, and other ailments thrown in, my body is doing enough battling without adding alcohol to the mix. Not that I don't know people who are doing worse, but as I've been forbidden from exercising by the quacks (so my body can concentrate on recovery) I'm holding back on the drinkies :(

Not that I drink much anyway, but a SC Hot toddy always went down well and, as you say, if one doesn't FEEL bad who really cares, usually? LOL.

Ta
 
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Making the water LOOK as transparent as it is seems tricky - at least, without filling the water with sharks and water plantlife etc. that tends to drag the eye away from the island. So experimenting on that from tiem to time still, but here's a slight diversion.

dyu05w.png


it's one of a couple of possibilities that occurred to me - the other being a Pandora logo made out of human bones.

Before we get onto the "bones logo" one - how do we like this one? Would it be better with some eyes in place? And/or older, dirtier bones or really smooth featureless white bones? there's probably a bunch of thin gs I could look into to improve the image, it was pretty much a quick idea thrown together to render while I was busy doing holiday things :)

Ta
 
Remember the eyes of Discworld's DEATH. Blue pinpricks. It would be blasphemy to have them be little blue Pandora logos.

Blasphemy, I say.
 
Eyes would make a huge difference. Without eyes that person died while playing with the Pandora(let's talk about battery life :lol:). I found the brownish bones in the catacombs of Paris pretty impressiv. My taste doesn't seem to represent the typical Pandora user, though ;)
 
So something like this would be right out, yes?

qzn4w8.png


Hmmm... will set a dirtier render going when I go to bed (shortly). Maybe the person died holding a cardboard cutout Pandora, waiting for the real thing to be delivered?


EDIT: Even DEATH needs a hobby ;)
 
Maybe he replaced the Pandora battery by a radiative powered battery for infinite battery life. Then he started doing a marathon with a complete set of rom.

Anyway... I like the blue eye. I think I kinda preferred the totally black background though.
 
marshal said:
I think I kinda preferred the totally black background though.


LOL. Of course you do! (that's the kind of result I expect when I try to please everyone, as everyone has different tastes - so, for this image, reverting to my preferred "simple black" ;) )

Good to hear that the rather cool idea of logo eyes is working out though :D

Here's the next WIP, with new skeleton texture:

286rh9e.png


I might just tweak the pose so that the fingers are better supporting the Pandora (the current pose assumes flesh that isn't there any more).

Ta,
 
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The texture looks great :D
It reduces the brightness, so it's much more realistic. In the first WIP it was too bright for the small Pandora backlight.
 
so we can sub-title this one

"typical Pandora owner two weeks after starting to test his new system"

that could be me, I tend to get obsessive with things I like :D (I could do with SOME weight loss ..... but not that much!)
 
To me, if the eyes are pupils, they seem pretty low in their sockets. If he's looking at the screen.
Bit difficult to explain.
 
They are no eyes as such, more a glow that indicates a lack of complete deadness or somesuch, imo.
 
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