I see a GI scene here

good work. Oh, Alias Maya user here too. Trying to polish my nurbs modelling

boomer86, what renderer did you use? Vray? or Brazil R/S or Mental Ray?

Some comments, the floor mat looks floating. Overall looks good.

any other views? modelling looks clean on the front. Nice control on the edge. box modelling or curve? By looking at the grille you made, i assume you use 3ds max? good job btw. Nice car paint shader too.

Ahh.. the tyres.. fully textured When my computer is fixed, i will send you tutorials on car modelling.. and theres 1 is about tyre tread.. might help you abit

Beginners should opt for 3DSMax first since the terms, commands in there is pretty easy to understand. Lightwave is a good start but the UI is complicating while Cinema4D so far is crowned to be the best newbie friendly 3D suite. There is a couple more 3d suites out there namely Softimage XSI, Blender, sideFX Houdini, Wings3D.. but due to they have limited resource, i wouldnt recommend you that until you are familiar with modeling, texturing, rendering and know the ins and outs of overall 3D terms.

Do a search around. Usually the more userbase materials like tutorials , video tutorials, example scenes for a particular 3D software should be easier for a newbie to start.

Frankly, all mainstream 3D softwares is the same if compare to each other but the only difference between them is workflow, technical tweaks, render engine implementation, pipeline implementation etc etc.

Also, many will recommend you Maya but from my almost 5 years in 3D field, its really not a newbie friendly unless you attend online workshops like Gnomon or the alternative way is to have a Maya veteran to guide you around. The learning curve is steep and some of the methods have no direct results but random results instead.

Anyway, good luck on your search and your exploration in 3D field.

This post has been edited by onscreen: Aug 9 2008, 10:44 PM

Cartoon-ish characters? or realistic ones? What is the duration you want the 3D characters to be in the short movie?

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Added on August 21, 2008, 2:26 pmMental Ray is a much more technical renderer if compare to others 3rd party ones. Memory / CPU consumption wise is benchmark through a GI scene and i would say V-Ray is much efficient in memory usage while CPU usage is the same with Mental Ray.

Mental Ray : Fully customizable renderer that is now integrated into most major 3D / CAD applications namely Softimage|XSI, Autodesk Maya, 3DSMax, Viz, Sidefx Houdini and so on.. The advantage here is that it is lean toward to heavy raycast, GI scenes like those you see in movies as the objective to to get as realistic as possible. It is also very customizable if you know the in-out of Mental Ray. Disadvantage is when you want to come out with your own shader, you will have to program it and some of the setting is leaned toward to a much technical terms and most artist have to rely on outside resource for custom shader.

V-Ray : A fast yet accurate renderer that is aim for realistic finishing. V-Ray is good in GI (Global Illumination) since it have an improved algorithms that speed up its photon map generation and light accuracy calculations. Advantage here is the renderer is faster compare to Mental Ray and also it have a good list of shaders to start with.

This post has been edited by onscreen: Aug 21 2008, 02:26 PM