Comments - Rafenrazer

Congrats on your achievements thus far mate!

Cheers!

Quick and dirty I'm afraid.

I'm still eagerly waiting to see the results of your endeavors!

An excellent entry, my only advice would be to move away from a 'photo-realistic' art style. Granted this is really a personal opinion, but in today's era of photographs and hyper realistic 3D graphics, its not really worth the 4+ hours of attempting to render realistic tones features and textures in either tradition or as I occasionally do; traditional paint.

Focus instead on dynamic expressive strokes and good tonal values; do it quickly and elegantly. Your skill here is solid and of excellent standard (if you plan on doing this again work on the eyes a bit more; its always the eyes that put you in uncanny valley). As an artist you should always focus on the 'big picture' little details like beard hair and the like are to be 'suggested'; putting down enough information will mean your brain fills the rest of the details.

In terms of what I mean this is probably a good example: Moddb.com

Here you can see that the artist hasn't gone into painstaking detail but has suggested it with brushstrokes and good tone. The strokes are clearly visible but we still get a clear image of the mans skin tone and 6 o'clock shadow.

By all means continue to do more of these images; its great stuff and always makes for great fun and practice. Just don't get to into it. That way you can save hundreds of hours (which I alone have wasted) chasing and achieving standard that doesn't warrant the effort required to reach it.

So I was watching the countdown, it hid zero. then the server crashed
"The site may be experiencing excessive load".

Indeed. I think you guys may have broke a record on that!

Indeed, this September I plan on taking on one of those short university courses to challenge my digital medium skills. As you said, apples and oranges, traditional has a nice natural; if chaotic feel not found in digital, but the same control over colour and texture values isn't anywhere close to digital.

remember, painting is the easy part, ensure the drawing you use is topnotch! And don't be afraid to draw over your paint if you feel anything looks 'wrong'.

I should probably note that an acrylic medium would work better with this impressionistic style of painting. At least for your first few layers. Oils are great with blending, but not so much in creating great brushstrokes due to the excessive drying time and the fact that placing new layers of paint to early tends to literally 'melt' the early layers. Other than that good technique.

Oh and its a good idea to to use 'opposite' colours in order to create dark tones, using tone to render light is a great way of communicating perspective to your audience.

Expensive? I spent less than $20 US dollars in paint and this piece is over a metre in length. Brushes only need to be bought once, take care of them and they will last a lifetime.

why thank you!

Perspective, tone, lines and a scanner. People like scans mate, photographs don't really capture the details on sketches to well.

Legendary shirt has appeared!

Wouldn't feel out of place in STALKER. Before I start to sound arrogant, I might like to point out that you can 'clean up' your sketches by blocking in limbs in the background that have identical parts in the foreground (e.g like a left arm when you have a right arm forward) with a solid, opaque darker tone, it saves you the trouble of having to clean up any messy sketch lines

All hail the dark lord Cthulhu!

Another Great release from you guys, congratulations on a job well done. You've certainly exceeded everyone expectations in quality! And Merry Christmas!

If your still interested in releasing some form of RTS retail product then I would suggest that you check out the Alamo, MassTech, or Essence engine for licensing. Essence, if memory serves is owned by THQ... Either way license fees would likely be significantly cheaper than anything Blizzard-Activision would offer.

As much as I love the idea of Australia acting as a major player on the world stage, I see several flaws in your 'back-story"
1. The Papua would never welcome IMT's 'law and order', just look at east Papua, Indonesia still can't enforce their rule over the populace to this day. Also such an invasion would require retaliation from all the commonwealth Realms immediately as written in their constitution
2. Australia has a very small population,(ok, you could get round this by having us as quality over quantity...You already thought of that I'm sure.)OR You could add that they recived a massive imigration over the course of two years from Europe &/or North America
3. ANZUS treaty and our constitution would require us to fight as part of the NATO hierarchy.
4. If Australia did become so badass, why didn't you mention us annexing New Zealand! :D (silly but plausable)

Minor complaints; sorry for ranting.

Also take note that E-series numbering is deceptive. German scientists have never been known for stupidity, much of the quoted mass of the tanks would have been significantly smaller than quoted. These designs we're presented to a production board that assumed that 'bigger=better'. As such much of the quoted statistics are likely to have been exaggerated. E.g the E-50 is often quoted as being from 50-70+ tons in mass and would have replaced the Tiger II and the Panther. It is much more likely that the E-50 would have been a Slightly lengthened panther with better turret design, and 88mm gun and a bigger engine, it's total mass would have been between 46-55 tons. To add to this point, I'll show you a comparison between the original two tiger variants, and the two concepts for the E-100 Germansecretweaponsnazi.devhub.com (or scroll down here Germansecretweaponsnazi.devhub.com). As you can see the size isn't that different, so the mass of these E-100 tanks wouldn't likely be as high as quoted. I suppose what I'm trying to say is, it wouldn't be a slow tank, the Whermact had to deal with the trivialities of the early tigers, I doubt the design board would give them just more of the same.

Great work though all the same! More goodies to get us excited.

Be careful how you go about implementing the E-100 (or tiger III as some sources claim). Firstly you shouldn't go implement it with boxy Krupp or similar concept turrets. These we're place holder designs created due to their ease of manufacturing in order to deliver a working, assessable prototype. A production turret would likely look more like this Static.hlj.com as had already said or like an up sized Panther II Schmalturm turret Achtungpanzer.com . Furthermore I'd have the track guards in a shallow curve, much like this scale model of ... the E-100 Germansecretweaponsnazi.devhub.com (or look at the second article on this page Germansecretweaponsnazi.devhub.com). Really if you want to suspend belief for us die hards out there, your gonna have to make decisions on to which part of these historical designs were BS and what was cold hard and practical.

The idea was that the rifle is smaller for ease of transport and production, like an AK but more extreme. But of course in this I pretty much threw ergonomics out the window. I'll just excuse my self and say it fires low velocity rounds....

Correction, it is actually called the VG 5, VG 1-5 refers to the development project of all volksturmm rifles...

Good to see the VG 1-5 (vg 5 as you seem to interpret as a production model) is in use. Bearing in mind it was intended for semi-automatic use... So will these Volksgrenadiers function much like USA riflemen from the original COH?

I was trying to think among the lines of a bio shock big daddy.... But with a distinct soviet influence....

Front glacis reminds me of the post WWII IS tanks, excellent rendition of Soviet armour.

So the confederates are sort of Germany's attempt of waging a proxy war against the USA? Smart, bears a good relation of what happened all through the cold war, and the Spanish Civil war.

Btw how will the Maus work with the Other armored vehicle in game? Will it play out a lot like the king tiger from vCoh? Slow, beastly but easily flanked?

Looking great, My only suggestion is arming the Volks with something else other than the Stg45. The VG 1-5 is my suggestion En.wikipedia.org Securityarms.com , it was purposely design for use by conscripts early 1945, both in terms of maintenance,ergonomics and ease of production. It's a semi automatic assault rifle so game play wise it doesn't change your unit. It just adds a little to the atmosphere and character of the unit.

I know people have brought up the idea of the Ak-47, but instead of suggesting the m14 or otherwise, would it not be prudent to instead to use an American equivalent? I personally suggest the Thompson Light Rifle, arguably the first American Intermediate assault rifle.
heres a link
En.wikipedia.org
And a pic
Img189.imageshack.us

Looks like a mix of mg42 and a M1A1 sub machine gun

Interesting, I'm really digging the halo, gives it a real "fallen from grace" vibe.

I try :D

Bugger that mate! It's the abyss all over again!