I have a question, what happened to my avatar image?

A presentation of the new features of blender 2.64 release.

A great blender and cycles tutorial on airplane modeling.
Free in Polish language, you have to pay for the english version.
http://airplanes3d.net/wm-000_e.xml#excerpt3
A new one,
Sculpted and rendered using the new blender 2.64. (no dyntopo or other external help here)
For sculpting I just used the remesh modifier (similar but not that powerful to zbrush dynamesh). Subdivided at ~3.2M quad faces.
Textures are by combining boxmapping and vertexpainting in cycles. IMO, supperior procedural shaders than in zbrush.

Virtual art, virtual galleries, shows, virtual money... and virtual artists of course. Virtual life then, virtual friends, communities...
Art was always virtual, after all. Life was not.
Or, was it?

Let's forget it. All this time I got involved on this virtual art, it was a great opportunity for learning some more on drawing, sculpting. It helped me a lot in real painting.

@unknownuser said:

Once you get used to it you do not want to be without it.

Same goes for OSX.
But, you can cleanup and reorganize manually your startup menu, it's more appropriate for the windows UI.

New thinner icons are much better.
This bright UI still burns my eyes. As the old one did.
A grey dark UI with white-grey text could be better.

The UI still burns my eyes! So white!

Posted images are 640 px maximum.
Images larger than this (mine usually at 700 px) will be resized to 640 px as preview.
Not too bad, considering that it still keeps its color profile. That's new in SCF (keeping color profile) and these are good news. Good work.
So, from now on, post your images converted to an sRGB c space. To be sure that everybody sees something similar. Under a decently tuned operation system, of course. lol

Regarding tools icons, still guessing what they mean and it works in most cases.
But, this bright UI still burns my eyes...

@unknownuser said:

Just on that Rich, when i hover over the my account box the dropdown menu drops down behind the advertisment so when i move the cursor down the drop down disappears, is this happing to anyone else?

It doesn't happening under OSX safari. Everything works fine.
We should be able to see the tool set under quick reply, especially the quotes. And, a simple quote symbol is better than the one now. The link also - a chain, I don't quite understand what symbol may be this. But it's ok.

A dark skin? What about it? SCF always burns my eyes. This is important.

Great work guys.

A real hdri is... a real hdri.
Crisper light...

@unknownuser said:

I think we all use our snakes as pendulums

Hey, you are too young for this.

Export anything you can from bryce as obj.
Kerky can import them directly.
Blender of meshlab to convert them to 3ds. And import into SU.
Just have in mind that texture files have to be in the same dir with the 3ds. Texture files have to be named with less than eight digits!!! 3ds meshes less than 64 K tri faces.
If you follow these rules everything will work perfectly.

What's so important in bryce for you, I don't understand.
Terrains? These use elevation maps, which are nothing more than B&W displacement maps. Any app can generate a terrain. Just make a square face, subdivide it a lot and displace it. IMO it isn't the best. Lot of stretching happens, in bryce too. A remesh modifier, after this displacement, provides a better, even topology though.
That's another reason to start learning blender, a little.
These nice fractal textures on water surface? Any app has them, the serious apps, I mean. Basically these are noise generators.
Trees? bryce trees are OK but there're are much better tree generators around, and they are for free.
Skies? Here bryce is good. But, hdris are much better.
Ready made rocks or similar meshes? Again, blender has a better rock generator not anything important though. A simple box modeling is more than enough for such subjects.

What I'm trying to say here:
Bryce is for free because it is simply of no use.
There're open source apps that can do miracles these days.
I invested in blender and I'm happy for this.
Some tutorials here. We have tutorials now, you know...

http://gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/content.php?223
http://cgcookie.com/blender/
http://www.blenderguru.com/
http://blenderdiplom.com/
http://www.cgmasters.net/
http://www.blendernerd.com/
http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/default_dvds.php

TIG's obj exporter?
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=33448

You can use it as a pendulum too.

the third one!

oh my...

What have you done, you murderer!
This was the divine Measuresnake.
We aren't talking about scales, we're talking about Scale.

@unknownuser said:

Well it seems Bryce will not import a Collada file.

Use TIG's free obj exporter!
Meshlab or blender to weld vertices (SU vertices aren't welded on exporting). Be aware of wrong (blue by default) normals of faces!
Textures will be exported too but I'm not sure if Bryce assigns them automatically. You may use the bryce silly tex editor to reassign.

@pilou,
We gonna need a bronze casting.
It's a 500k faces mesh, it's rather a big file for posting. As a obj file of course which means that you have to build your own shaders etc.
Now you, as well, you're facing the scale issue. How many details are needed now... how deeper to carve...
Anyway, it's not a good sculpt.
A digital sculptor should be able to work exactly into this environment.
We should never forget that sculpture doesn't stop on the outline of a figure. It's rather an abstract composition of lights and shadows, shapes that start inside the mesh and have references to the background. Or the opposite.

Regarding a known issue on architectural visualization.
A building and some nature, trees around. If a good tree generator is in use, providing detailed trees... then the 3d building starts looking fake. Fine details suddenly needed, bevels on sharp edges, very precise texturing, etc etc. Design is the most important, of course, but I'm talking about technical issues, at least.

@pilou, edit:
http://www.3dsaloon.fr/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?t=2587
Thank you so much! Too kind comments, from orgelf and Kargall as well.

Of course it's your house, I knew it.
Technically speaking, all these are great. But these tools give us the opportunity to start feeling closer to real art.
This is where modern art starts. Start feeling what scale means. It's not logic, it's a feel, mostly.
Bizarre indeed, Oli.