And nice to hear from yet another guy from the ‘neighborhood’ .
Are you doing CG as well ?

edit: oops, forget the dumb question, just saw your website. Some really beautiful and interesting images there. I definitely like your style.

cheers
Martin

cheers,
Manuel

greetings from Innsbruck btw.

Thanks for you comments.

Unfortunately I do not have any practical experience with rhino. I know it’s mostly a nurbs based modeling software and thus is quite different to blender. You have basic nurbs support in blender but it is really basic.

For the jewels of the crown I had no real template and tried to create cuts suitable for the time the crown was made. This was no hard to do with blender. But I am no expert in jewels and their cuts, so it might be that rhino is better suited for this.

About training material: There is a huge amount of tutorials on the web, but a lot of them are unfortunately outdated (pre 2.5x) and the noise to signal ration regarding quality is a bit low …

A good place to start is the education section on blender.org as well as the tutorial site http://www.blendercookie.com. They have excellent made, high quality video tutorials on a broad range of topics.

A beginner book for the new 2.5x series would be ‘Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender’ by Roland Hess.

You are a very talented artist and the images are very beautiful indeed.

I have been looking at purchasing Rhino when it comes available for the Mac but come across Blender thru a magazine article. Is Blender good to use for creating 3D jewellery as your Austrian crown image has blown my socks off!!! The reason I have been looking at Rhino is because this seems a popular choice for Jewllery design and illustration?

Would you recommend a book or training video to get started on Blender?

Thank you so much for your time and keep up the amazing artworks

Martin

hope I dont interruot you

Wish you all th best with your own project. Any details yet ?

And criticism, especially constructive, is always welcome. So thanks four input here.

I didn’t know Scott Mcloud in particular, but I am in theory aware of the ‘uncanny valley’ which seems exactly what you are referring to.
I see what you mean about Ara. I tend to drift to too much realism when doing cg or even drawing, so the outcome isn’t too much of a surprise for me
I always feared to get trapped too deep inside the uncanny valley with this project. It is now too late for any major redesign but I guess braking up a bit the symmetry sounds like a good idea, at least worth a try anyway. This shouldn’t break any animation.
I consider this all as part of the learning experience. The design decision for sintel was certainly a good one. And for my future projects I will apply the lessons learned with Ara’s Tale.

Thought I might give you some constructive criticism if you’re willing to hear it
I saw your high quality render of ara’s face and am very impressed with the detail you’ve been able to achieve. I wonder if you’ve ever heard of Scott Mcloud? Very influential writer on the subject of comics, anyhow, something i’ve learnt from him and those who succeed in creating a convincing model:

When creating a character, one must be aware that the closer you try to get to realism the more your character will tend to look a little creepy. this usually has to do with the fact that people find it harder to relate to something so human-like yet obviously unreal and therefore abstraction helps us to get passed that. In your images of Ara (stunning as they might be) I feel an uncomfortable symmetry to her face and would recommend that you explore breaking it down a bit to create something more simple and relatable.
Sintel convey’s this perfectly, in sintel’s face I get a fantastic sense of something which is expressive and surreal yet it gives the uncanny sense of realism. I think this makes the real difference between a character you merely believe and a character you actually like

Keep up the enthusiasm!

Thanks for your words. CG is a very welcome diversion from the sometimes dry technical aspects of software development.

Ara’s Tale is a very personal project and started with the intention to learn as much as I can what it takes to finish a short. This experience should enable me to better plan and produce further short film projects which will certainly be done.
So I am afraid right now there are no tasks available, but thanks for offering your help.

I came in contact with blender 3 years ago and got in love ever since!

I wanted to know if there’s any room for the project, or
if you know any other projects to work in!
My strenghts are modeling, texturing and rigging, but
I’m up to any task!!!!!

tx, ed