Anim8or Community

@davdud: AO mean Ambient Occlusion. It's a render pass which creates realistic light bounces and shadows. It will make tight places, places when normally light doesn't reach so good, darker. This will give a more realistic lighting.
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Same goes voor HDRI reflections: they will make you reflections more realistic. It the tiny details that will make you composite realistic.

@davdud: Is that supposed to be me?  Yarrrr! :p       Nice entry!
@3D Joe Wiltshire: the modeling should be done in anim8or, but you allowed the render in a other program.
@BMattster: I like you use of colors and reflections! Maybe a bit more AA samples to make it a bit less grainy...
@NickE: Didn't count them... but I will believe you that it are exactly 1000 bees :p
              maybe a bee hive would be a nice surrounding?

some do it down some forward.

When the palms face forward the skin on the forearm is relaxed. (It's the natural position with regards to the skin 'tension' for lack of a better term) However when you twist it to face down the skin twists. Try looking at your forearm and you'll see the twist.

I learned this on another forum where I asked for feedback on one of my models.

I think you mean the other way around: palms down is the natural way and has no twist I believe.

Can't wait to see some entries! Get those ideas going people :p

Thanks you guys! Ofcourse I cheated a bit :p

I hope atleast a thousand people will join the challenge!

In this tutorial are some tricks to achieve glows and lighteffects: http://anim8or.com/tutorials/from_users/lighting_tutorial/Lighting.htm

I like the render nick, too bad you can't easily render more of them.

About your questions:
At first: are you object casting/recieving shadows? and are you light(s) casting shadows? Else it might be possible that you have shadows turned of in your render settings. Go view>preferences and make sure that shadows are check on in your file output.

You can use black and white textures as transparency maps on you materials: double click on you material to open your material editior. Click textures. Now a new windows opens where you can load different textures. Now load you black and white image in the 'trans' -tab. Black will be see through and white will be visible.

You can also texture those face with a material which has a high emissive value. It will give the material a bit of a glow.