3D people!

[Appolo]

http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m148/tlabresh/Picture2-1.png

i know it's not really a stick figure, but i thought i'd have a whack at making some kind of person thingy. more will come soon.

[Daedrous Avari]

Interesting. Gets an 8.5 out of ten.

[Appolo]

i have better ones now, but my photobucket's acting up again...

[Bryn]

After much time spent on 3D forums, providing critique on peoples work, and creating my own, I have a little to say about this. Hopefully, I won't come across as too critical... sorry if I do sound unfair, I have no idea how much experience you have.

First of all: If your software (whatever it may be) supports it, turn on anti-aliasing (AKA oversampling). It will sort out the pixellated edges to your shapes, and make the whole image a lot better.

Secondly, I think the shapes need more definition - at the moment, it is a lot of primitives combined, and I'm sure you can do better than that. Move some vertices around, shape the head a bit more... except it's meant to be a stick figure. Nonetheless, it could do with eye sockets, a nose that is actually part of the head, and a more carefully shaped moth... as well as some work on the ears. Fingers would be nice.

I'll break that up a bit...

Firstly, the eyes. Even on a stick figure, they are often further down on the face. If you selected all the face objects, and moved them down slightly, it would help it enormously. If you could also make slight dips in the face where the eyes are, it would look good - although it would probably be against the stick figure style you're aiming fore.

Nose: As a cone intersecting the face mesh, especially un-smoothed, it does not look so good. If you want it to intersect, I would think a sphere would be better (look at many different comics and cartoons for examples of this), or, if you want to keep it conical, it would look tremendously better as part of the head, not intersecting with it. Its worth noting that if you're aiming for an OOTS-ish style stickman, the face has no nose... as parodied in one of the guest comics, IIRC.

The mouth: mouths are very odd shapes, actually. The lips usually do not protrude, although it is commonly thought that they do. If you want to keep the lips the way they are, it would probably be best to connect them at the edges, and make a continuous shape, inside of which you could have a hole leading to the inside of the mouth (otherwise it would be very difficult for him to eat!).
Even if you do none of this, smoothing the nose would help.

For a stick figure, the ears are alright, I suppose. Holes, instead of additional black spheres (its never that shadowed inside the ear!) would help.

Moving downwards, I think the torso is too tall compared to the rest of the body - even for a stick figure. Make the torso shorter, and the legs longer. As for the arms and legs, they look quite odd as straight rods - try making them curves, or giving them joints. In any case, making them part of the body - rather than having them intersect - would help!

I think thats enough for now, and its good for a first try at a person (mine was much worse!)

I'd be interested to know what software you are using. Personally, I have only ever used Blender, so if that is what you are using (which it might be), I can give you platform-specific advice.

Materials... at the moment, you have done litttle more than change colours. That's alright, but skin colour is not like that I'm afraid. If your software supports hexadecimal colour, there are some good examples of skin tones in the Arts and Crafts thread that would improve upon the look of this a lot. If not, well, it needs to be a lot paler than it is already, and less purple.

As for lighting: put a plane under his feet, set up a simple 3-point lighting arrangement, and it will look a lot better. That means a yellowish light near the camera, and two dimmer ones, one of which is behind him, one high, one low, the high one casting shadows.

Good work, anyhow!

[Daedrous Avari]

Wow. I thought you said you had LITTLE to say about it.

[Appolo]

wow...um, thanks a lot. right now i'm using the demo portion of AC3D, which i got off of apple.com, so i don't have acces to all of the different features. my budget is very tight, what with me not having a job, and so i tend to lean towards the free stuff that doesn't have all of the fancy features. this was just a project to occupy me while i was bored, and i liked it enough to subject it to your scrutiny. thank you all for your advice, and i will start work on the issues brought up ^^. there are only 15 colors avaliable to me, so be prepared to see more like what i poseted above, unless i can figure out how to use textures, inwhich case, there will be a varry of colors.

[Bryn]

*Looks up*
*Realises how OTT the crits are*
*Mumbles a vague apology*

[Shameless advertisement]
In that case, may I reccomend the open source software Blender (http://www.blender.org)? It has pretty much all the features of the major 3D software, like 3DS max and Maya, can model, animate, render in-program, texture, bump-map, has a game engine, supports python plug-ins, and is often updated (as well as having an active community).
It's free, which means it is free to download the software and the source code (in case you wanted to reprogram it or anything like that), and although it takes some learning at first it is really very powerful.
There are also plenty of user-written tutorials to help you learn the software.
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Just in case you wanted to change software or anyting...

Any chance of seeing these other people you mentioned?
I'll post some of mine later...

[Appolo]

does blender work for mac?

and i lost my other people! my compy crashed in an electrical storm, and my 3d art was lost among my itunes library (5000 songs are hard to re-load on a computer...), my iphoto library (i didnt have much), and a few of my work documents...

[InaVegt]

does blender work for mac?
There are versions for windows, mac OS and linux, so that'll probably mean a yes.

[drake]

Its creepy lookin.I dont like it....much :-/