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"An animator, cool. Yeah, I can see how that would be a rather restrictive job space.."

Yeah... you almost have to be in close orbit to LA. Hehe.

Try http://www.nanogator.com/gallery. If that doesn't work, try this. If those are blocked... err.. sorry! :)

Any chance you've got a larger desktop wallpaper sized render of Pimp Ferion?

This is about Greebles (or nurnies): Greeble

Plus there is a great picture of Imperial Stardestroyer, and references to Star Trek, Borg, etc.

I am a 3D modeler/TD by trade, heh I guess that lingo isn't common geek speak, here is an article on 'greebling', or 'adding nurnies and greebles' to an object. It's basically the art of making up hi-tech looking crap. The original star destroyers were greebled with plastic navy ship parts and other crap. Interestingly enough, i think they were somewhere around the size of this guys toy; i may be wrong...

"First of all, the SDK only supplies hooks into the black box of the proprietary code. This is still not as good as having access to all of the code; if the SDK sucks, then you're still screwed."

Your point is very true, guess I didn't clarify enough when I said the bit about nobody haveing the source code to Lightwave.

"And now to digress: instancing can only go so far. In an example of 1,000 monsters running down a hill, you only have one source model, but that model still has to be loaded into memory once for every instance. Every polygon still has to be rendered; heaven forbid the shot calls for raytracing! The only benefit of instancing in this case is that you can tweak the model once and have it propogate the changes 1,000 times."

This is also true. You cannot get around the render time. However, I guess I didn't clarify this enough either. Lightwave (just like any other app out there) loads all its objects into memory, and then does the render. So if you have 1,000 objects, you have 1,000 objects loaded at a time. That's where the 'wishing you had terabytes of ram' bit comes in. Lightwave would be swapping like mad. With instancing, you don't need to load 1,000 instances into RAM, instead it works on the first one, then does the transform and renders it again. It's very similar to just loading the mesh , rendering it once, and then compositing it.

I could see the problem yoiu mention here when it comes to reflections, though. You wouldn't need to keep reloading the mesh into RAM, but you would need for it to perform the appropriate transforms on each cast of the ray. Hmm.. I'd have to think about that. But, then again, it's only a problem if it's a problem.

"It wouldn't do a damn thing for saving memory unless you also re-write the rendering software to load the object for each particular instance, render, unload, reload to next position, etc."

Again, you wouldn't need to make the renderer do that. The worst case scenario is you script LW to render the object to a buffer, transform and light it, then render it again on top of the buffer of the previous image. Build it up. Actually, that's more or less what LW's renderer does on a per-polygon basis. Incidently, there's a plugin for LW right now that does the instancing trick. Somebody in this thread brought it up already.

"This is why animators render in layers. Greater control, less headaches, and no custom software necessary. Just intelligent thinking. "

Yep. I myself use this technique. Curious about it? Here's an example a friend of mine cooked up. In this case, he merged elements from two different apps together.

Sorry to babble, don't feel all that well.

"If I could re-theme my hardcoded windows GUI, themes would be the most important thing, ever. "

You can re-theme it. Check out this thread here.

Here's what my desktop looks like. It's customized with my own (in progress) artwork on it. And yes, those are buttons and multiple desktops there. Some of the stuff there is default, and some of it I added on my own.

So yes, you can modify your 'hard-coded' theme. Somebody's already gone through all the work to do it.

"If I could re-theme my hardcoded windows GUI, themes would be the most important thing, ever. "

You can re-theme it. Check out this thread here.

Here's what my desktop looks like. It's customized with my own (in progress) artwork on it. And yes, those are buttons and multiple desktops there. Some of the stuff there is default, and some of it I added on my own.

So yes, you can modify your 'hard-coded' theme. Somebody's already gone through all the work to do it.