The Lotus in its natural habitat (Modo 401)

@unknownuser said:

• Vertex tools: vertex should be used like lines or faces, or should be able to select them,pushpull them, move them etc;

You can actually do this right now, but only one vertex at a time: make sure nothing is selected, then place the move tool over a vertex and click. It works best if you want to move the vertex along one of the axes because you can lock in the direction of the move with one of the arrow keys. It's a bit clunky, but after a while mouse-click + up arrow + VCB (for displacement distance) becomes second nature.

As for SU 8, something more elegant for vertex manipulation would be appreciated (with a soft select as in Silo) but I think SU's current UV tools implementation is its biggest shortcoming. Maybe it's fine for wrapping low-res photos onto cubes for Google Earth, but for anything else it's unbelievably primitive.

I would also greatly appreciated to expand selections one at a time, as in other 3d progs: in other words, select 2 adjacent polys, edges (or verts!) in a loop, and have the up arrow (or some other key) add the next logical item to the selection set. Double clicking an edge to select a loop would be mega as well, or double clicking the second poly in a loop to select the loop etc. The ability to save a selection would be helpful as well, although there are workarounds for this...

I like blue + blurry + noisy for the mood they create. They grey reads more like an old photo and the final ones without noise seem a bit too "real" without being hyper-real (which would be a good way to go: either completely abstract (like the first ones) or ultra-realistic).

Very nice to have this function as a pseudo-built in rather than the clunky workaround previously required to make lathed objects. Thanks!

Yes, always thought provoking stuff; the antique keyhole in the ultramodern lockset is an intriguing idea...

Believe it or not, I actually raised Silent Running in conversation this morning! Good luck with the render. It'll be nice to see this one progress.

Give it a try and you'll see it works.

I always enjoy seeing your renders because, unlike the vast majority of professional-class renders, yours have an element of art to them instead of making ultimate photo-realism the only goal. So keep them coming!

Trying to find anything less than perfect in these two renders is a bit of a task, but it might be possible to improve a few things: the corbels could be roughed up a bit (they look like smooth plaster against all the concrete); the palm tree is gratuitous (a single, off-centre tree in that environment is extremely unlikely and is not necessary to create an "exotic" feel; the entire environment already does that); and the texture you used for the pavers in the foreground looks a little low-res and might benefit from some bump (or more likely: detail has been lost in resizing the image for posting here...).

A major thank you for this thread. I downloaded gimp and am impressed--it's far superior and much more polished under Vista than the release I tried a couple of years ago on Mac.

The "make seamless" filter works pretty well, but I am eager to try out the adobe filter too. I wonder if the Nvidia normal map plugin will work? I'll give it a try too.

Very helpful. Thank you!