I thought it would be interesting to have a series of stills with work completed so far. None of these models are completely finished but I was curious to see how they look as a group. So far we have Midge, Skarab, and Croaker, with the Jetwasp in the background.

Good looking characters.

I keep wondering where those shoulders rotate from.

that's an EXCELLENT QUESTION. As soon as I figure it out I'll let you know. I'm looking forward to finding out myself.

As a matter of fact, Skarab is *mostly* rigged (needs fan bones, weighting and a face rig) and the arms seem to work okay, but I won't know until I can do some "real world" testing.

Well, now that the Christmas animation is out of the way I can get back to my REAL work! But I see I've been banished to the Archives. Hopefully some activity here will reverse that, maybe, possibly!

I've simply got to convince everyone the standard for posting images here in the forum should be PNG format with Alpha Channels on (without the ground plane of course). Thats an image format characters deserve to be rendered on!

Great to see you posting more on Nightcallers.

Good point about format for character renders, Rodney. I couldn't honestly find a good composition for posing these various characters together and the result is not very interesting. I should have done a little movie where I pan over them, just for a bit more visual interest.

Gerry, I may be in the minority, but I probably wouldn't look at a *movie* of a still model unless it was less than 300K in size.
The number-three thing you can do to make your images more interesting is to light them in interesting ways.

Very cool looking characters Gerry!!

George

I'm in agreement with Holmes. This is another reason I try to champion formats like PNG.
They work well in the forum and can be reused later for compositing.

I'd suggest movie formats best serve walk cycles and animation that reveal important aspects of the characters personalities and the lives they lead (i.e. their stories).

Another great thing about A:M is that we can render out to sequential PNG images.
In this way individual images/frames can be repurposes and/or composited into still imagery.

Edit: Prior to the advent of PNG I tried to champion the use of TGA.
Targa is a great image format but it had one problem... incompatibility with viewing online via the internet and in html.
PNG overcomes this problem.

would love to see these characters in action.

Well, my next step will be to get serious about rigging these characters and doing it in a consistent way. I've been learning the various rigs and I'd *like* to have all these characters rigged as identically as possible, (I guess it's all a work in progress anyway!) but I haven't settled on what rig I would go with.

Then there's the shoulder problem. I can see in my mind how they would work, but rigging them to do so is a problem I'll have to solve.