@CybranM hey sorry for the poor image, i just wanted to focus on the overall expression. this amount of detail is already twice the resolution than it will show up in the final image XD here's an idea of what it's gonna look like:
I put together reference and inspiration, including some rough sketches of what I am thinking of building. click image upload image hosting without account free photo hosting how to do a screen shot
hmmm. The works good, but he should definately be crediting people. http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?106297-Guardian http://cghub.com/images/view/707435/ also, pretty sure this is a Karanak concept http://cghub.com/images/view/697747/
I might suggest uploading your WIP to a separate website and then use the "Insert Image" option so that the image previews in full resolution, instead of the small thumbnails. Interesting to see where you'll take her design wise
From the first image it looks really good but as you get closer to show off details, you really start to see jagged edges that detract from the overall model. This starts with the second image, and the black normals on the grill.
One piece of software people should not live without: Acronis Image that badboy clean install... and the next time you have OS trouble... bam.. half hour format and restore image and you're up and running again.
the tutorial 'blob' shadow is just round a B&W gradient circle on an image that get projected on the ground, you could change it to whatever shape you wanted, and swap it out for other images when you feel like it
Your 1024x1024 test image is 1226x1226. Was that intentional? And FWIW, here are the auto-generated checker images from Blender, plus a mipmap tester DDS. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1751508/TestUV/Archive.zip Any updates on the mana well? :)
First thing I thought of was "superstructure" http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=superstructure Pretty good image on the 3rd page. But I don't know the specific term for the forward-end gear.
in theory you could render an image to the size of the free space in your hard disk, so I doubt it's the video card. I rendered 24bit images over 4000 pixels on each edge with a 2mb amiga 1200.