Kris Smith: Sorry to hear about all that's happened over the past couple years. Hopefully, things are looking better for you now and continue in that direction, because your art is awesome and it'd be a shame for us to be deprived of it  
That Rumble and Frenzy pic on your DA site rocks my socks man. Love love love it.  
Everyone's 3d art is truly inspiring, particularly, I would LOVE to see that Dinobot sword finished (wicked tat btw).

I have nothing to add artwise, as all my 3d renders thus far keep turning into ashtrays ><

 

I had been working on making the head of my movie Wreck-Gar design. Obviously simplified a lot, but I was going to try and animate it looking around quizzically to show off things like the mustache and antennae (not pictured) but for the time being it's on hold because it was driving me insane.

 

Well thanks for the kind words   I'm pretty sure every horrid thing is in the past now (2nd month in on a brand-new ISP too, no internet problems anymore) I'm just starting on cranking stuff out on a pretty regular basis now.

Some of the 3D modellers we have here are absolutely legendary and I'm glad so many of them have still stuck through it, they have more patience than i  

I still remember when I first got a look at weewoo's Super Fire Convoy HOLEE CRAP was that thing amazing. The shame is I had a VERY old 3D model of Action Master Soundwave that she did a render for me with awesome metal reflections and it looked WICKED and that, and a TON of old stuff, has all gone bye-bye. Probably in one of my many old computer crashes. Same with my REALLY early original TF models back when I was one of the original 3D tf artists WAAAAY back like a DECADE ago. I had tons of G1 guys done and all GONE. Can't even find renders. I love having a brand new compy now, but it doesn't bring all that old stuff back :-C

 

holy crap... i hope to god you finish those  

 

I've just not got the time to actually finish anything these days, what with working on my house, graphics on two games and life in general. The most recent case has to be the Rumble/Frenzy model (which wasn't finished texture-wise before work had to take priority again), but there's been so much that's just fizzled out (like SD Scorponok, Classics Astrotrain and G2 Classics Deluxe Optimus and the game stuff - both the isometric stuff and PSP models)...

Yeah, OK, I'm rubbish. Guilty as charged. But one of these days, I'll finish the lot, I tells ya.  

 

Damn Rob, I'd love to see you finish that Swoop!!

 

damn theres some great work in here

you should try and finish them they look great

i love that swoop and the movie wreckgar head

 

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this WAS Starscream at one point before i became increasingly frustrated with figuring out how to build a G1 face with movie quality and at least somewhat plausible from an Engineering standpoint. All those internal gears and crap are just that, crap to make you think that this thing is going to be really detailed. Half of it isn't even attached to anything and is a bit dubious in how it works.

I'm not giving up on old screamer, but I'm going to wait until I can really formulate some kind of a PLAN on making this bastard.

 

i tink youll find that it's actually the other way around - trying to use the interface for something like maya is enough to make most people cry! if you dont have anyone to teach you then you are by far best off starting as simple as possible, with something like google sketchup, then once youve mastered that youll be able to appreciate what benefits that the added complexity of more advanced software can bring without being overwhelmed by all the options you dont need at first

 

Speaking of projects that never got finished here is a video I did for the intro and menu system for an unofficial BotCon 2002 DVD that never got made. Not much to this. I also did the credits but it's not very interesting.

 

Loving this thread! Here's another 'piece', when I had the somewhat insane idea to try a CG redux of part one of 'More Than Meets The Eye'...suffice to say, it didn't get much further than this before it all went pear-shaped...  

(PS Sorry 'bout the zip, but got nowhere to bung an AVI and I can't be bothered with YouTube...   )

 

I'm really looking for something with animation and (ideally) IK. Sketchup animation seems limited to stop-motion and camera flyarounds at the moment.

One function I find a bit tricky to emulate in a lot of modelling programs is the ability to work on more than one physical arrangement of the same objects at the same time, and have any changes made to one view automatically update in all the others. This would be ideal for Transformer design, as you'd be able to tweak an item in one mode and get a real-time idea of what it looks like in the other mode(s).

I can imagine it might be able to be simulated by programs which either support multiple master copies of a single object or the ability to open multiple editing views along a timeline, or in applications which have an extensive internal scripting/programming language.

For extra bonus points, rig something up so that when an object is selected in one of the linked views, all the other views rotate to bring that object to the fore.

Nonhierarchical grouping of objects would also be nice. Transformers can have components which are close together in one mode but far away in another. (especially shellformers and other kibble-heavy designs). If I'm working on tweaking the exact dimensions and appearance of, for example, G1 Omega Supreme's rocket, I don't want to have to select both arm chunks separately when setting circumference, texture/color etc. I'd like to be able to set a "grey-bits-of-rocket" object grouping unrelated to the "left arm" and "right arm" groupings.

But yeah. At the core - basic shapes, basic colors, basic skeleton and animation capabilities, and make it freakin' simple and easy to use. I don't need textures, splines, transparency, autosmoothing of object paths, mass, gravity, skinning, blobbing, hair, cinema-quality post-production FX, lipsynching, surface tension, or anything other than the ability to define very simple robot parts and move them around.

 

This project of mine died early on. I was going to use my completed Prime model to make an Ultra Magnus,. Blcoking it out was as far as I got.

 

I agree about most of the drawbacks with sketchup though you might want to check out this guys blog for some experimentation with rigging in sketchup (and awesome models).

In Sketchup you can have multiple copies of components (groups) so that when you edit one all other instances of it change too (which I think is what you are talking about). For animation you'd probably have to get the full version and export the models to another program though.

 

It does seems that 3D programs in general still have a lot of interoperability problems and there's a slew of half-supported proprietary file formats. It'd be nice to see a kind of XML-ish file format where all the common items are defined and yet there's still room to tack on app-specific areas. This way, anything which reads the file will at least be able to make sure the basic object components exist in the right shapes, colors and orientations, and whichever app wrote it will be able to extract much more. Then the segments which the more popular programs added in could be combined and added to the spec. The old files would _still_ conform to the new spec because of the optional components, and it would be trivial to write translation programs to turn old-spec files into new-spec ones without losing any information.

And yeah, I know about the screwed-up Dassault attempt at this. An open-source version supported and endorsed by major commercial users of 3D would be a better way to go.