[sandman300]

I was playing with the hue through the image editor.:p

[Mark]

Still prefer the red

Just been taking a look at the closeup of the cloth. Looks pukka. And in closeup the mail is superb (although it does suffer the inevitable 'flat edge' that shows it as a texture rather than geometry - nothing really to do for that though)

[sandman300]

Thanks, Red was my first choice. I wanted to paint my bedroom red but my wife wouldn't let me. I tried to fix the thing with the chainmail. It turns out that when I rendered it out of lightwave, there was some sort of distortion in the render. sort of like perspective view. The middle is fine but the edges are different. I thought I could just build a bigger array but the strangest thing happens. Lightwave crashes. I'm thinking it might be because I've got vista running. If you 've got some time try this.
1. make a toroid(settings as shown)
2. rotate -30 on z
2. array 100 on z at with a z offset of 2cm
3. select all, copy, rotate 180, and move 1cm in the z, then paste (should be alternating links all connected).
4. array 100 in x with a x offset of 6.5 mm.

my computer ( and I confirmed this with win task manager's performance monitor) sucks up all the Physical memory (2GIG) while the CPU sits at around 50% for a little bit and then drops to almost nothing. a little while later LW crashes.

I'm wondering if this is LW or Vista?

[Warlock 279]

Hey, this is starting to look really really good. I second the motion for the red armor. Looks nice with that gold trim. The blue might look nice if you went with silver trim as well. The cloth is looking really good as well. Nice stuff all around.


On the toroid topic, I was feeling adventurous, so I gave it a go.

Straight outta the gate I know this was a probably a bad idea; for the record I've got a P4 1.5gHz, 512 megs of ram, with a 128 meg GeForce 5200. I assume you were subpatching the links so they're round. Anytime you start cloning/arraying stuff your poly count with skyrocket incredibly quickly. I suspect you're well aware of that since you started with just a 5x3 toroid; Even with that tho, your poly count will sneak up on you in no time.

Like I said, the math on this told me right away it would be trouble and that I shouldn't even try to do it, but I did anyway.

For the sake of anyone who may not know it, the math looks something like this; I might be wrong somewhere along the line here, but this should give you an idea of what's going on anyway...


You've got....

1x 5x3 toroid =15 polys
x101 [100 clones plus the original] = 1515 polys
x2 for the copy and paste = 3030 polys
x101 clones again = 306030 polys
x36 for subpatching, [6x6 if you're at the default subpatch level of 6] = 11+ MILLION POLYGONS! :eeek2:

..wait...

x2 as I'm fairly sure all subpatches are tripled/trianglulated, I know for a fact they are at render time, not certain about OGL, but it looks like they there are as well, to avoid artifacts/tears, so you've effectively got 22 MILLION POLYGONS!!! :mg: :eeek2: :eek3: ...I reckon that about says it all.


Luckily for me, I long ago set Modeler's subpatch level to 3, figure that's what I'm gonna be rendering at most of the time, and I can't throw around a ton of polys anyway, so I was only dealing with 5.5 million polygons [306030 x 3x3 x 2], which I can safely is the most I've ever had on screen, and that includes sculpting excursions into Blender.

Now this did totally crush my computer, and wasn't "workable" in the least, could hardly rotate it in OGL, and I could hear my HDD paging like a demon when I tried, but it did work. I did have to do the subpatching before I did the second array. after that array it was just too much for my computer handle to do much with. Despite the "reduced" poly version working on my PC, I'd have to guess that 22 million polygons would put a serious hurt on just about any computer, including most of the bleeding edge power house of a PC's out there.

What you could do is look at using a lower subpatch level, or just more segements in the initial toroid and by-passing subpatching altogether.

I'd think that a 10 or 12 section, 6 sided toroid, smoothed would work OK, especially given the small size of the links, and that would weigh in at 1.2 to 1.5 million when all is said and done, which should be a lot more managable.

There's always hardware solutions, but those aren't necessarily the best route to go tho bigger and better toys are always more fun.

There may be OS solutions as well; such as increasing cache/pagefile/virtual memory allowances perhaps. I've heard Vista, using something called "Boost" can take advantage of a jump drive/pen drive/USB drive as additional ram.

I think my preference would be not to use Vista just yet, but I respect that often times that isn't a viable choice and you can be "stuck" with a certain OS. Now I can't say I've used it personally, but from what I've read about it, it needs some work yet. Heard some stuff about under performing OGL, which may be big factor here, and that some versions of Vista require a 1 gig of ram just to boot, which if the OS is tying up a lot of ram that might not be leaving a lot for LightWave. The 64bit build of Vista running something like 16 gigs or ram, might be a pretty hot setup tho. Vista's ram usage seems a bit excessive to, 'course who am I to talk about using an OS with efficient memory mangement, as I'm still rockin' Millennium Edition.:p

I'm not sure what you're intentions are with all those links, but that's a lot of polygons in any case. I'd definitely try to scale if back if at all possible.



Lastly...

" I wanted to paint my bedroom red but my wife wouldn't let me."

...you're half that marriage, and a room has four walls. By my math, that means you're entitle to two red walls. I think they call that a compromise or something. Not sure how you want to handle the floor and ceiling, but one of those should/could be red as well. [Note: I cannot be held responsible for any failed marriages should this advice be taken seriously, sorry.]

Anyway, top notch work so far, I'm looking forward to seeing this finished, and I hope you can get the chain link array thing sorted out. Cheers. :beer:

[sandman300]

Thanks for trying that. Yeah, mysubpatch is at 3. I tried a smaller aray (10 x 100) ...crashed:angery: . I'm sure now that its Vista. Its my own falt. I built my new computer, but instead of buying the OS online with the rest of the stuff, I got it from work (I'm a system builder). Hey, employee discount:attn: . Well my experiment (yeah thats what it was).. conclusively demonstrates that it is not reliable at this time for professional video or animation. If I have time this weekend, I'm going to downgrade to XP. The only thing going for me is I got Vista Business so I can downgrade without buying another OS.:attn:

Well , thanks for the help.

[sandman300]

Well, I am now on XP, and it works much better.
I was able to render out a larger ring texture and fix the chain mail part of the UV.

[sandman300]

I also added some more detail to the torso area, textured the eyes, eyebrows, and face.

edit: woops I forgot the reflection map.:p

[sandman300]

more work.

[sandman300]

the head, I wanted to use the new simple skin material node but I have no idea how to use it. Anyone have a clue or even better a saved node setup that I can look at to see how its supposed to be set up.

[Mark]

That sound you can hear is my jaw dropping ....

[sandman300]

Thanks, I appreciate the confidence. I think its about ready for the final entry. I built a sword this morning (I so love holidays). made a couple endomorphs, And rigged him... well here is what I have so far.

[sandman300]

...:p

[Mark]

Ooohh.. just noticed (and this is not something you need to worry about for the contest I guess) ... look at the underside of his pauldrons (shoulder armour - I think that's the right word for it)... looks like the material is only one sided since I can see the sky through the underside... (and through the elbow pieces too)...

[sandman300]

Yeah, i saw that , but I didn't think to make it double sided. I guess the shadows would hide the double sidedness of the textures. Ill think about that for the final. Meanwhile here's a composite in my back yard.

[admiralbcd]

amazing work !!! The armor detail is great.
I couldn't vision the original model to get to look anything like this !
:bow: