Anim8or Community

I don't know about a tutorial, but I'll give some things I used to make mine in the dragons challenge. Mainly I just mixed and matched many different parts of animals and changed them slightly to make them more dragon like. I took reference pictures of bat wings and put them on the body of a cat with a long tail and neck and made a head based largely on a T-rex. A mishmash of random creatures combined to look something like a dragon. But you can obviously create different elements to fit the style you want, like a chinese dragon looks much different than a medieval european dragon. You could easily use the picture you have there as a reference and make that dragon in 3D. Start at the nose and move to the tail or however you feel would be best to model it. You could even box model the head and go on from there.

Here is the file for my dragon so you can see how I did things if you want.

If you are trying to use a texture that has transparent parts I believe you can use a transparency map(read about them in the manual) with that texture to make those areas clear or semi-clear, depending on the grayscale level of the trans. map. One note; I'm pretty sure I've seen that the ART raytracer does not support transparency, so transparent areas will show up as shadows.

I've figured out the process you described and I've followed it, but there are just too many places where it messes things up. I'm thinking that the only way I'm going to get everything to look exactly right is to just completely re-render the whole scene again. I could just render the parts where the laptop shows and delete all non-neccessary objects from the scene(entertainment center, bed, shelves), which would cut down the render time alot.

I'm just going to be REALLY lazy  

I cut out the rest of the desk, including the little bit on the left side where the deskframe covers it. So now I should be able to just paste over the original and be done, no extra editing I hope. The only problem I can see is when the laptop opens it will show as soon as it passes the desk. I'll post this latest fix render, it's alpha, and the original as soon as it they are all finished rendering(only a few hours for the fix), so you can see what I'm talking about.

One thing I noticed is the light got dimmed in that process, any fixes for that? or should I just edit it out in GIMP before I merge them into AVI?

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think it would be useful to use the alpha channel to make the background of the fix render transparent, then overlay the fix over the original. I just do not know how to do this in the new programs. I'll read the manuals.

I found a good tutorial for wax that will help.
http://www.debugmode.com/tuts/wax/travelling_mattes/travelling_mattes.htm

Can you show me basically how to do what I am trying to do  in virtual dub? It takes me a little while to get used to programs and I would like to finish this up. 

Grr... I made mistake, The laptop is too far back and clips through the desk. Already working on fixing it in post production. I removed everything in the room except the desk and laptop and things needed for proper lighting. I am rerendering, with alpha channel, all of the frames with the laptop in them. Then take the three images(original messed up render, desk render, and alpha channel) and use the alpha channel to remove the border from the fixed desk render, then overlay the fixed desk over the original. I takes me about 2 minutes per frame over 300+ frames... Time to practice perserverence.

Yeah, my room is a mess too, I had to clean it before I could start. 

In object mode, select the reference image like you would select any other object, and then use the move tool and move the reference image away from the direction you will be looking at it. You can move it either by using middle mouse button and moving your mouse around until you see your points that you made, or you can switch to another view and move it that way.