Anim8or Community

Great start, I know how deceptively difficult animating a basic walking sequence can be.  I would suggest a more pronounced bending of the knee on the forward swing of each leg, which will lift the foot from the floor, then straightening the leg at the start of each step.  At present the shoe appears to slide forward and backward, in an almost cross-country skiing action.  Also, the legs are not the only thing that moves when someone is walking.  The hips swing and the spine curves, allowing the foot to describe a more or less flat path rather than an arc, and the whole body moves up between steps and down at the start of each step, etc.  I know this all sounds complicated, but seriously, attention to these details will make a good animation excellent.  You have a great starting point in the figure itself, it is very good, and it is worth spending the time on this.

Um... is it just my machine or has animanon.xtreemhost.com been domain snatched?

Cheers.  Yes, the Rubiks cube construction & animation would make a good tutorial.  In my opinion, it is the little details that make a good model or animation excellent.  Hope to see more of your work soon.

Very, very nice, lovely texture on the planet.  Only one irrelevant crit: the illuminated portion of the planet should probably be considerably thinner if the sun is where the image places it, more like a fingernail crescent, to be totally accurate.  However, to have the sun visible in the frame, and enough of Earth visible to allow people to see what it is, I think a fair bit of creative licence can be taken, especially in an image such as this, so I agree with your composition completely. 

That's good thinking, and it works well, except for one small problem.  When the boat disappears up the right river fork the "reflected" boat is hidden behind the curve of the river bank.  A true reflection would still be visible for a bit, being reflected from the water's surface.  It is certainly a nice technique though, and if the camera angles or river course were adjusted so that issue could not be seen, it would be perfect.

I like the ring system.  Nicely conveys a sense of scale and depth.  Looking forward to the vid.

The Anim8or renderer does not support ray-traced reflective surfaces, but using the Env. Map feature in Textures, with an appropriate cube map or longitude/latitude image, gives a good result.  To create a mirror surface the Env. Map setting should be set to 100.  The ambient/diffuse colour should be black, Rough should be set to 100.

Obtaining the reflected image can be a bit of a pain.  In the past I have constructed them from renders of the project itself.  In other words, leave the actual environment map till last, when you can use renders of your project from different angles to construct it.

Thanks for the pics Jene, that is exactly what I had in mind.