I was gonna suggest modeling the surrounding buildings but then I read you didn't wanna do that haha. I'll look up some hdri's but idk of any thay arent gonna mess up the scale.
Breaks color pallette of axe completely. (Sorry if that sounds harsh :P) Try Black stone, darker wood, yellow gems, make the boundries (cylinder parts idk) red, and make the scales dark grey
Run cycle will do for the time being. now, the attack animation: His regular "bow pipe" attack, only slightly modified. Still need to animate him settling down and going back to idle pose
I disagree about the head. it's his project, not really fair to tell a man how to shape his characters head.. although i'd say it does look a bit masculine if its meant to be a female.. but idk
This is awesome. Seriously. It's static but idk, I think the composition is brilliant. Only thing I'd different would be to bring a more dark and evil look to her face. She just seems too happy. haha
If there is anyone around still rendering stuff on a single core CPU a trick with similar results is lowering the priority of the rendering process. This will more or less only let the rendering run when the CPU would otherwise be idle.
Good choice and advice. Good thing you went with the dedicated GPU cause my integrated eats ram like no tomorrow.. it makes me cry :( my normal ram use is about 52%, on idle.....
Idk, they changed stuff that didn't need to be fixed, which always pisses me off. I just used max 2009 like I said, and all was good :D . Screw 2010 until they fix it.
Google has one of the Muybridge books as an online PDF, I don't have a link handy, but I just looked at it a few days ago...I plan on purchasing the whole set as soon as I can.