Do you mean secondary spring-like animation, where it just lags behind the head/body motion slightly? Many ways to do this, perhaps easiest is the Flex modifier, via vertex selection. There's also the Spring controller if you want affect the bones instead.
The simplest way is just to turn the lighting off in Maya. In the viewport menu, select Lighting->Use No Lights. You can then screenshot your object when you need to present it. Could you post a shot of your WIP. It'd make it easier to make suggestions
Nice selection on concept, and great exection. Like others have said, it would be great if everything was completely done by you, but I can understand time constraints. Just make sure you revisit this one when you have time. I'll be looking forward to it. :)
rooster: With polydraw you don't have to dot verts down, you just select what average face size you want, and just paint on the mesh and it makes quads with edges in the direction of your stroke angle. Sounds like the 2nd option you mentioned.
hehe just ctrl+drag outside of the model (just select nothing) and that'll get rid of the alpha mask that you accidently painted. Be careful when your working though. be sure to work each division level to its fullest before moving on. Good start.
I always remember the bird is the word from an old Natural Selection map called 'Bird_Seige' or someting. It was a pretty fun map, but while you where waiting for people to join or pick teams in the ready room, it just BLASTED BAHBAHBAHBIRDBIRDYEAHTHEBIRDISTHEWORD over and over and over and over...
Awesome game. Imported my paragon soldier from ME1. Combat is streamlined - which I like, but the drastic decrease in weapon selection was bit of a let down. Played ME2 with Vanguard, took some 30hours or so. I did all possible side-missions.
Vig: Maya has a "batch bake (mental ray)" option, and you can choose to bake occlusion to a map, or directly to the vertex colors of the selected mesh, which is quite nice. You get the same result using Eric's method in Max, but it is a few extra steps.
For the brute force approach. I would make a rough camel-shaped model, and N "mirror" thin-box pieces, then constrain them to the camel surface, duplicating and sliding them around as needed. Then just select all the inner faces of the boxes and make the lowpoly from that.
this script will turn the uvs into geometry which maybe more useful for you open it in maxscript editor and with the boot selected press ctrl-e.... then you can scale to match the boot convert the border edges into spline shapes and export those to package that can print to size ?