Hah! People who are bound to drawing programs and those handcuffed to bitmap editors are never going to see things the same way. That's precisely why I did this "3D cartoon" as one of my friends typifies a lot of my work.

Agreed, Mike. I'm not setting out to show any disrespect for the company that hosts this forum. Conversely, I've posted dozens of Xara drawings on TG, Graphics.com, and other places, and ultimately it becomes difficult to submit my artwork to any specific gallery because one of the "guidelines" is that it must belong to species of software used to create it. I submit surreal, abstract, photorealistic, and other styles in different categories, but it just gets silly when you have to use Software X or Y to be able to post the result onf one's talent on Gallery X or Y.

When it's a design competition: yes. When it's a personal gallery...erm, I don't see the point.

How I created the "Pencil" scene: I drew the basic vector paths in Xara. Because there isn't a modeling program out there, not for $$$$, that has as good vector tools as Xara. I exported the paths as Illustrator files to Cinema 4D. Then using a number of different projection styles, I turned the paths into meshes that extended in 3 dimensions. A simple example of this technique is to draw a circle, and then in Xara you can project it forewards or backwards to establish the third dimension: it's called extruding, and modeling programs also offer sweeps, lofts, lathing, and other projection types.

Then I moved the project to Luxology modo, because it has a rendering engine superior to C4D. I assigned lighting, camera angle and other parameters such as exposure and depth of field, applied materials to the meshes, then rendered it. The sky was created in Vue, and then the two images were married using Photoshop.

It sounds ambitious, but it's really all in a day's work when you've been doing this 3D stuff close to 20 years, and were dropped on your head as an infant several times.

My Best,

Gary