The short will of course require a few environments. The one that will be the most interesting to create is the Weevil Hive, headquarters of Biff, the Exalted Grandragonfly, Skarab's former school chum and rival for Midge's affection.

Just to keep things active here, I'm posting these maps of the Weevils' home planet, Arthropoda. Don't know if I'll have occasion to model the planet, but there are some surface features that will appear in some of the storylines. The Weevil Hive is located in the Pompadours. Most of the planet is inhospitable to life so Weevils cluster around Camp Swampy, the green band along the equator.

http://www.mooneyart.com/bugbots/arthropoda.html

Very cool drawings Gerry. Can't wait to see them in 3D.
My favorite is the "Blowhole Badlands" ...

very interesting!

Pretty Punneee!

I like Moth & Louse Poles

I've got a drawing of the Blowhole Badlands in one of my sketch books. There's a dramatic jetwasp chase through the badlands in one of our stories.

Looking good ,a lot of work but it would be a nice chalange

Here's another rendering of the Hive from my files. I think I may start on modeling this soon.

After the holidays I'll try to post additional images of some of the environments I'll be dealing with.

Took a stab at modeling the Hive yesterday but then work came in so I'm pretty much tied up for the month of January. On the one hand it will be fun modeling something elaborate like this that won't require any rigging, but as for the scale, I *think* it needs to be lifesized if I don't want to create probs down the road. Hopefully I'll get back to it by the end of the month.

Here's a quickie render of the Hive so far. Pretty rough and the textures need some work but it's progress!

Looks like a good start ,going by the image ,do you have any bump or displacement on there yet Gerry

Thanks Steve, the torus-shaped part of the base had a disp map but I deleted it for the time being as it was making the modeling sluggish. It was merely a copy of the color map set to disp. but these decals are just placeholders for now, may keep 'em, may tweak, or just replace when I'm farther along.

One more progress shot...

Looking good Gerry.

Every modeler probably has his/her own way of doing things, but for me personally, I tend to get better results if I save decals and textures until the very last. I just use basic color groups to show different parts. When I do that, I find that my base mesh tends to look much better - though it is a little more difficult sometimes to make the base mesh look good without decals and textures. Then when I later add the textures, the whole thing looks MUCH better.

Yep I admit it, I've gotten caught up in the texturing! I keep toying with the idea that I should delete all the decals and leave them til last, but when I get to a stopping point/problem in the modeling, instead of forcing myself forward I just start playing with decals and textures. Not the best process but I'm making progress! However I may also do a "clay" render on this because I like the way that treatment looks.

Thanks for the comments!

EDIT: Actually this is probably it for texturing, since the tower elements will all be textured similarly. I was most curious about texturing the "plume" (the base section) and I wanted to test a rocky texture/displacement map for it. I'm not happy at all with the decal on the crenellated wall so it's on for now but I think I should just remove it and wait til later to do it right.

Can't argue with that. Sounds like a really good approach. Like I said, everyone figures out what works best for themselves.

I believe in the future for character work I'll work at leaving the decaling til last. I realized the advantages of this on my Christmas animation and it makes good sense for characters.

A little background...

The Pompadours are a region on Arthropoda of ancient volcanic plumes that stayed standing when the surrounding crust was eroded away. Satan's Pompadour is the largest, and is where the Exalted Grandragonfly (aka "Biff") decided to build his evil headquarters, designed to be accessible only from the air. However the base of the plume is riddled by above-ground extensions of the subterranean Honeycombs, a planet-wide network of shifting and dangerous natural tunnels and caverns.

So, in theory, the Hive is accessible via these tunnels, but they've never been mapped because of pretty regular cave-ins, fault lines and geological movement. But the Honeycombs play an integral part in some of our storylines.

Also, while the Weevil Legions build above-ground, the Rebels mostly dig and live in tunnels and burrows, which, when they go deep enough, often intersect with the Honecombs.

Here's an updated image. Still pretty rough and the mesh is not continuous but eventually most of it will be as I stitch elements together.

At this point the changes may not be so apparent but I want to keep this updated...

Nice interesting looking hive/castle

visualy interesting.
Nice imagination.

Thanks. It's coming along better than I expected, though slowly. I also realized yesterday that I've never drawn the back (or even a side view!) so it will continue to require some thought as I progress to flesh out the detail. Also as I mentioned, not continuous mesh, mostly just overlapping shapes. But in the end that will work fine.

One more incremental update... I was on "vacation" for the last two weeks (stayed at home, slept in, went to movies in the middle of the day, ate out, etc.) and didn't work on this at all. Now I'm back at the office, but no work for the time being so I'm back on Arthropoda!

That's a nice looking hive Gerry. It's funny that you only work on your "hobby" project at work

Well I need to keep my time organized!

Here's a little more detail in a zoom-in movie. I've been working on detail around the entrance.

It's looking great, Gerry!

One more before I head home for the weekend...

Looks ominous! The textures and lighting really make it look great.

Very Nice, Gerry!

Great design

Here's another one, playing around with ground textures, sky, and the surrounding terrain. I'm also working on a lot of "human-sized" details that at this distance are mostly not visible.

Lovely ,reminds me of a Hindu temple .Great drematic sky there Gerry

Thanks Steve, and the other commenters too! I'm having fun with this.

Here are a couple of pieces of cover art I did back when this was a web comic. The first one was done in airbrush back before I got my first computer, and the second one was done in Painter...

I can't tell the diferance ,there both great ,you must be very good at art ,I have a job to paint my house lol

Cool stuff, Gerry! Going to be awesome to see all of this come into 3D!

I'm rendering a fly-in/flyaround of the Weevil Hive that will be 540 frames or 18 seconds. The early frames, at a distance, were rendering at about 3 min/frame. I left it rendering overnight and now that the frames are closeups, this hair material (well, and displacement maps too ) is taking a toll...this morning I see that each frame is taking a half hour! I guess I'll just let it render all weekend. but it's looking pretty good. I wish now I had added a flicker action to the torches because they're looking pretty cool!

Eventually the hair will be offscreen so I'm anticipating the renders will speed up later.

Cool! What kind of Mac are you using? It can really make the process faster if you run multiple instances of A:M and have all of them rendering frames for you, but I'm not sure if that would work if you don't have multiple processors.

I'm doing all my 3D stuff on my work computer, a Dell somethingorother. I may run multiple instances over the weekend but during the day I do need to get *some* work-related stuff done so I don't want to pile on! But I also wonder if running multiple instances would slow everything down and result in a wash as far as saving time. It also tends to crash when I leave it on overnight so I'm a little leery of burdening the processor for days on end, then coming in Monday and finding out it crashed at 8pm on Friday!

Just had a thought though...I'm rendering a targa series so maybe I'll abort this render, move ahead to where the hair is off screen and render out the "easy" frames first. Hm. May do that.

Looks wonderful!
I know what your saying about render times, in my new project I have animals that take around 3 minutes per frame by themselves.
once I put several of them in a scene and add AM liquids into the mix I am expecting some really long rendertimes.
But it will be worth it.
Your work looks great! Great detail!

thanks Gene! Yeah, I've got hair, displacement maps AND motion blur going on. My machine crashed about an hour ago so I restarted the render, and the first frame (#124) has been rendering for nearly 50 minutes so far and it's still not done. But I'm in for the long haul so there you go. I could have done this at a lower resolution I guess, but I'm looking for drama in this render.

EDIT: scratch that, I just restarted the render at 320x240. It would've taken a week!

Here's the rendered flyaround. The render took a little over 36 hours. I'm doing a little post work on it and adding sound and I'll be posting it to YouTube.
the model itself will be getting a little more detail as well as modeling the interior somewhat. I think it will make more sense to have a separate model for the interior for additional shots but I wanted to have enough interior on this model to allow looking in the "front door" and seeing something.

Been working on the "front door" for the hive, got rid of those "candle" flames for a nice particle emitter and added the engraving on the steps. The flames look better animated than this still, which looks like yellow leaves flying up. I tweaked the fire sprite from the fire tutorial but maybe there's a better flame-type shape for the sprite.

Nice