Anim8or Community

Well, now that I know y'all like her, I have to try to come up with a composition that includes her in my entree.

@davdud101, I actually wasn't finished with the feet, in this image I made the feet as well as facial details.

Sooooo I have actually been trying to think of a way to have 2 characters physically intereacting with each other in my render. Though this was a stump for me because of how--- well Robin is more or less the only solid icon of Anim8or.

Now I know that this might be reaching quite a bit here, but I realized that Steven's Shark has consistently been a part of the of the splash screens.

http://www.anim8or.com/gallery/gallery1/sharks.html

SOoo it occurred to me: I could continue that! Sure I could probably come up with a new design for a Shark-chan, either in the form of a mermaid or maybe some kind of legged shark anthro.

Of course I bring this up because I really like the idea of the challenge of creating a composition that has 2 characters physically interacting with each other as I think it would present this idea of weight and volume to the subjects that having a single character doesn't nearly as strongly convey.

But also I think it'd be pretty cute to give Robin someone to share the screen with from a pseudo narrative standpoint.

FSS, if I had to choose, I'm actually almost torn between the second and third poses, but the second wins out.
To my eye it feels a bit dynamic even though it's a very "stable" pose, which catches my attention. It also does a great job of displaying the quality of the model herself in the... well, 'hands', talons, face, tail, etc.

Incidentally pose 2 is also my favorite, I quite like how it brings out the feathery look of the top part of her dress-like red feathers, it really helps to give definition to the overall design, or at least, that's what I was going for.

---edit

Refined the pose of her sitting such that the ears and tail have better directional sense, made her tallons have less awkward toe poses, and changed her facial expression.

Maybe raise the diffuse or ambient value on the materials or something like that.

I'm thinking that since the splash screen is a horizontally oriented image, for the sake of making Robin absorb as much of the space as possible, she herself should be oriented accordingly instead of being straight. Because if she were straight, she'd probably look about 30% smaller unless part of her was cropped out.

As you can see in this pose, it is a lot easier to read the shape of her skirt and legs.

I'm going to play around with a few other poses though, Ive got this one idea in my head of her maybe derpyly laying on her belly.

---edit

Also here is the first pose, but at a different angle, somehow just that and a few tweaks manages to get the composition look much more solid *shrug*


---edit 2

Here are two poses of her laying on her belly like I described above.

Out of the four I have so far, which one do y'all like the most?

Decidedly I'll be taking a different approach with posting my WIPS on this page for this contest.

My composition is going to be character-centric, so I've spent last week remaking my model of Robin. Here she is sitting daintily but this time with posable ears. And more importantly scales actually modeled into her claws instead of textured onto them.

This, by the way is probably not the pose I will wind up going with, since I want to come up with something that works well with the image dimensions as well as takes advantage of the unique shapes in her design, this pose I feel makes her legs and skirt too hard to make sense out of.

I wanna see if I can get a composition similar to the Deviant Art artist Sakimichan. And I fully intend to have an actual background too at some point.

Question, could I do a full composition? Like rendering a full outdoor environment? Or do I have to stick with more basic single color background with maybe a chess board?

My brother and I were having a talk about why we've been using this freeware program for a decade.
We've always found Anim8or to the program we use the most. Even considering the fact that when we make our games we do everything from modeling, music, to programming without help.

The only other 3D program I use is Maya, but I don't model in it, I just use it for animation because it is very easy to run it's FBX animations in Unity. But my models are always made straight out of Anim8or.

My brother added that the maya forums have an unusual feeling to them, since he would ask about if Maya had a tool, basically he tried to describe An8's cut edge tool. The reaction he got from the people there was basically : "Why would you ever want to do something like that?" Without actually addressing the question to solve it as a problem.

From what I understand, people who primarily use Maya treat 3D modeling as digitally sculpting things. Where as, at least for my brothers and I, Anim8or let's us make models by what feels more similar to making a drawing but in 3D (a-la our collectively most used tool "add-edge") or otherwise a digital form of origami, a-la cut-edge tool (our second most used tool).

Maya on the other hand, as far as 3D modeling, seems to require some rudimentary understanding of sculptural principles.

Besides how much I appreciate how An8 simulates 3D drawing + Origami, here are some other reasons I love it personally.

1) It's a tiny file, that can be installed like nothing.
2) It loads up pretty much instantaneously, even on lower-end computers.
3) The Arc-Rotate tool. It can do everything you need a camera to do and is easy and intuitive to maneuver.

What about y'all? Why do you love anim8or?

I second Davdud101's notion.

Anim8or's splash has always been a bunch of pretty random objects, soo what if it's splash screen consists of a handful of renders composited together by the community.

I can see why you would say that. While not that game, there was an JRPG I fondly remember enjoying as a kid called Xenosaga:
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/xenosaga/images/6/65/Image91q19.png/revision/latest?cb=20141027001944

Here, however, is a figure showing my style in the form of a timeline:



2007-2012 I was in a phase where I didn't know what I was doing, so I tried to emulate animu. You can tell that it's falls short of that. 2014-early 2015 I tried to create my own style distanced from animu. People told me that they didn't like the direction I was going, so I gave my fans polls, and with their suggestions, winded up combining elements of My Little Pony and The Spectacular Spiderman, and suddenly I had found a definitive style that worked exceptionally well for me.