David El Tom wrote:

An impressive day's work!

Are you doing the uv unwrapping in Wings?  Or where?  Personally I have 
abondoned the Wings autoUV feature and use UVmapper instead.

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Jim Charter wrote:
> David El Tom wrote:
> 
> An impressive day's work!
> 
> Are you doing the uv unwrapping in Wings?  Or where?  Personally I have 
> abondoned the Wings autoUV feature and use UVmapper instead.

thanks,

actually I tried to do the uv-unwrapping in Wings3D but failed. I tried 
also UVMapper (which I've to run through wine). The results where better 
but far from being satisfying. So I grabbed the Blender manual and 
looked for uv-mapping. Even so badly described, blender offers a huge 
flexibility, cause you can easily manipulate uv's for each face, parts 
of a submesh or for the whole mesh.
For example the legs are unwrapped piece-wise cylindricaly, the 
resulting uv's are propper arranged and stitched together to give a 
rectangular grid. Even so it's very flexible it's still a lot of work 
(still not completed yet).

Personally I prefer Wings3D for modelling as it's easy and fast. 
Especially I like the sub-divide facility in conjunction with soft 
and/or hard edges, a feature I miss in blender (or didn't found it till 
now). If you sub-divide in blender and want some hard edges you have to 
divide the mesh in several parts, and its likely that you get small 
discontinouties at the seams through sub-division.

So the normal way of modelling in my case is starting from scratch in 
Wings doing a rough mesh, sub-divide it, reuse it into blender to do 
basic texturing uv-unwrapping and rigging (adding bones for posing), 
export it, proccess it through some external scripts for hairs and such 
things and then start with propper texturing in POVRay.

Orchid XP v2 wrote:
 > Well, it's looking good.
 >
 > The leg joints don't quite look right. And a spider probably shouldn't
 > be quite that shiny either. But otherwise it looks pretty nice.
 >
 > (Apparently some people don't like spiders. I consider them my allies.)

The idea to model a spider came as found a huge araneus diamentus 
(Kreuzspinne) in our garden (see attached photo). I was not really sure 
about the joints too. So I googled around and found a scematic (also 
attached) of a spider's leg, which I used as template.

... dave

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Attachments:
Download 'spider_photo.jpg' (80 KB) Download 'abb04.jpg' (8 KB)

Preview of image 'spider_photo.jpg'

Preview of image 'abb04.jpg'

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David El Tom wrote:
> Personally I prefer Wings3D for modelling as it's easy and fast.
> Especially I like the sub-divide facility in conjunction with soft
> and/or hard edges, a feature I miss in blender (or didn't found it till
> now). If you sub-divide in blender and want some hard edges you have to
> divide the mesh in several parts, and its likely that you get small
> discontinouties at the seams through sub-division.
> 
	If I understood you properly, the feature you want is accessible in
Blender with the Shift-E shortcut. Then moving the mouse allows you
to choose how hard the edge will be.

		Jerome
- --
******************************
*      Jerome M. Berger      *
*  mailto:jeb### [at] freefr   *
*  http://jeberger.free.fr/  *
******************************
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Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
> 	If I understood you properly, the feature you want is accessible in
> Blender with the Shift-E shortcut. Then moving the mouse allows you
> to choose how hard the edge will be.
> 
> 		Jerome

thanks,

I'll try it Maybe not today, `cause I have guests and pretended to go to 
toilett just for a second or so, but I´ll try.

... dave

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David El Tom wrote:

> The idea to model a spider came as found a huge araneus diamentus
> (Kreuzspinne) in our garden (see attached photo). I was not really sure

Cute. Both, you render and the photo. IMO, since spiders eat the
disturbing insects (flies, bees, mosquitos etc), I'd say Andrew is
correct - spiders are our allies. I actually have one 'bout 4cm long
living in my bathroom (wonder why there's never disturbing insects there
:p), but it hides always I have my camera around; it's shy :).

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> I actually have one 'bout 4cm long
> living in my bathroom (wonder why there's never disturbing insects there
> :p), but it hides always I have my camera around; it's shy :).

Maybe you should attract her with a fly as an egagement present ;-)

... dave

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Guaaahh!! I dont like spiders...
And this one sure enough gave me the creeps..

GJ

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RusHHouR wrote:
> Guaaahh!! I dont like spiders...
> And this one sure enough gave me the creeps..
> 
> GJ

wait until it`s finished, I can feel the shudder right now; a cold 
breeze streaking my neck :-)

... dave

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David El Tom wrote:
> still todo ...:
>   - finish uv-unwrapping
>   - texture works (middle part and legs should be slightly
> translucent)
>   - body hair
>   - rigging (prepare for posing)
>   ... AND ...
>   - find a nice context to put in

I once made an animated spider:
http://runevision.com/show.asp?id=42

However, the model was very crude and couldn't stand a closer look:
http://runevision.com/3d/anims/ws_spider_zoom.jpg

One day when I have time, I'd like to make a longer and better spider 
animation which also features a better spider model. I don't have the 
patience to make such a model though - I don't consider myself a modeler. If 
I could borrow a detailed spider model, I could make an animation that would 
show off both this model and the abilities of my Walking System... :) I have 
no idea when I'd get time for something like that though.

Rune
-- 
3D images and anims, include files, tutorials and more:
rune|vision:  http://runevision.com
POV-Ray Ring: http://webring.povray.co.uk

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Rune wrote:
> David El Tom wrote:
>>still todo ...:
>>  - finish uv-unwrapping
>>  - texture works (middle part and legs should be slightly
>>translucent)
>>  - body hair
>>  - rigging (prepare for posing)
>>  ... AND ...
>>  - find a nice context to put in
> 
> I once made an animated spider:
> http://runevision.com/show.asp?id=42
> 
> However, the model was very crude and couldn't stand a closer look:
> http://runevision.com/3d/anims/ws_spider_zoom.jpg
> 
> One day when I have time, I'd like to make a longer and better spider 
> animation which also features a better spider model. I don't have the 
> patience to make such a model though - I don't consider myself a modeler. If 
> I could borrow a detailed spider model, I could make an animation that would 
> show off both this model and the abilities of my Walking System... :) I have 
> no idea when I'd get time for something like that though.
> 
> Rune

Hi Rune,

I know your animation well, and was imazed by the fluid motion (and this 
two or three years ago; I think) even the clip is quiet short.
I hope to finish the model this upcoming weekend, 'til I don't have the 
time during the week to do so. But once it's finished I will share it 
with pleasure (on demand, 'til file size is getting to big to post it).

Problem could be the posing itself. Maybe I create two versions of it, 
one complete mesh for posing in blender through amatures and another 
multipart mesh, which would make animation within povray a lot easier, 
even so the joints wouldn't stay a realy close look, but this could be 
comouflaged by clever texture adjustments I hope.

!!!
 > I don't consider myself a modeler.
!!!

For my part I like to go into details but once I've finished a model I 
often don't have the motivation anymore to put it into context.
This nearly cries for synergy ....

... dave

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