Anim8or Community

I agree with lynn22 and thecolclough.  It's the little details that make a good model excellent.  I would also tone down the range of colour difference in the texture.  It looks a bit too extreme for cast iron.  But it would be excellent for tarmac or ash in an old fireplace, so write down the settings before fiddling with it!

Hmmm... I would suggest using morphs to bulk up the muscle there.  It might be a bit complex when it comes time to animate, to synchronise the bending bones and the morphing mesh, but if done carefully the results could be superb.  Good luck with that, mate!

Excellent, has a very "gamey" feel to it.  A couple of points though: The motion of the gun, representing walking, seems too slow relative to the motion through the scene.  It's as if the dude has a fifty foot stride length.  I would suggest slowing down the speed through the maze, which will also give viewers a better look at the environment.  Which brings me to my second point: some nice textures and lighting effects would make this really special.  It's an excellent start, well done.

Hihosilver: Nice, wouldn't have thought of that.  I would create a cross section of the ring, using a stretched n-gon or manually drawn polygon, shift it off the axis of rotation, and lathe it.  Quick and simple.  You could also create an extrusion from the polygon and then use a bend modifier to curl it up perhaps, in much the same way a ring is made in real life.  I dunno, I would have to experiment with that.

I agree with Kubajzz, but you will have to make sure the plane is always perpendicular to the camera, no matter what the orientation of the sabre.

Basically, the magical thing about Anim8or, and indeed any animation package, is its ability to work out intermediate steps between steps you define.  For instance, you could make a simple animation of your spaceship, making it fly across the field of view, by defining a scene of, say 100 frames.  Select the first frame position on the scale at the bottom of your screen, click the icon with a key on it, so it turns green, and move the ship to the starting point.  Then, with the key button still green, select the last frame on the scale at the bottom, and drag the ship to its final position.  You should notice a white line that traces a path across the screen, from the ships starting point to its end point.  This describes all the positions the ships will be in during the animation.  Click on the key button again, to turn it off, and click on the first frame position again.  Now click the play button.  Your ship should move nice and smoothly across the screen, as the software calculates each actual position of the ship.

Thats the basics.  For such a simple animation there is no need to use figures (bones) at all.  I suggest following the excellent tutorials on this site, designed to teach the sort of knowledge you want.  And experiment.

Realism stems from three things in an animation or render, in my opinion.

One, the model itself.  Try to make your wireframes as realistic as possible, computing power and rendering time considerations notwithstanding.  Your model is fine, if a little basic.

Two, materials.  If possible, create materials using textures derived from photographs.  For example, take a photograph of your loungeroom curtains, adjust the colour in an image editor if necessary, and build a material based on this image.  Then you can apply this to the side walls of the theatre (many cinemas I have attended have curtains covering the side walls).  Consider carefully the ambient and diffuse settings.  In a theatre, the shadows in corners and up in the catwalks will be black, so your ambient setting should be very low.

Three, lighting.  Probably the most important consideration, in modelling AND in theatres.  There are the overhead stage lights, the follow spot (for live performances), footlights, house lights (for intermission, etc), little blue lights running along the aisle to help you find your seat in the dark, illuminated seat row numbers at the end of each seat row...

Basically, the level of realism you can achieve is limited only by the time you want to spend on your project and the computing power available to you.  I have yet to build a model that was too complex for my aging Sempron processor, but I have built models too complex to render this side of the Sun going nova.