Hey there, critter looks really nice to me. And don't give up on your project or feel like you let people down what you're going for is massive so it's not going to happen overnight take it as a bump along the road and bounce back 
Don't know if you ever came across this film https://thechaseshortfilm.com/ but I'm sure everyone told that guy he was mad as well.
Since you feel a bit discouraged for now how about figure drawing? You could practice pose and proportion, it's more rewarding than trying to do the whole 3D thing on your own straight off the bat. If you study staging and storytelling you can move on to doing your own boards and animation when you get to that point with the film project as well.
Here's some refs I like;
https://www.elfwood.com/farp/figure/w...struction.html
https://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.cz/2...rinciples.html
https://www.alienthink.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/markcrilley
https://www.idrawdigital.com/2009/01/...nd-proportion/
It may look nice, but it's only made with a bit of extruding, connecting the fins to the model (as I doubted that I could see them easily if I had extended them out of the body, sewing them to the body was easier), and use of shaders (no texturing done except for the iris and that was one of Maya's fractal textures, everything is just blinn shaders + transparency + refraction + glow).
That film has awesome action and effects, though the characters aren't quite perfectly human (kind of like how Pixar makes some of their characters, I'm not sure if I've seen a movie by Pixar where characters look kind of like in Final Fantasy movies for example).
Not that I will go for perfectly human either, just as close to human as I can (and I know there will always be room for improvements, but since our team has only one 3D modeler...)
I wouldn't have told the guy he's crazy, and nobody told me that I am crazy (no idea if they think so though), in fact, they asked me where they can learn about 3D modeling and I told them about this forum. But then one of them got his computer shut down by his dad due to exams he has at school... The other one is busy with his work.
I could at any time try to make the storyboards, as I already plan on making a comic strip as the final chapter of the novel which the animation series will be based on (each chapter coincides with an episode / movie of about 30 minutes or so).
But I don't know if I could handle that + the rest of the stuff I've already assumed to do.
The problem is how we divided the work for our team (we call ourselves Blasters District, don't laugh -.- we went before under names related to explosives, we used to be (-Piroteknix-) Team when we were making movies about a game we used to play together, and I did the video editing / special fx / some music).
Here are the roles we have / had for this current project:
My friends had to do:
- part of the rendering (especially those with pcs with more cores) (3 people, now only 1)
- storyboards (1, now 0)
- voice acting (4)
- logos (1)
- visual effects (1)
- video editing (1)
- music (1)
- 3D modeling (1, but unsure)
I have to do:
- 3D modeling
- 3D animation
- some rendering
- video editing / visual and sound effects
- music (all on synthesizers, trying to put a software to use for what it wasn't quite intended, which will be one of the hard but interesting parts of this project)
- scripting
- writing the story (already done 33 chapters, but only chapter 1 is important for the first project anyway)
- sketching the characters (will use MS Office Word for the fun of it, though I could have used Flash, I fail at drawing in Corel due to not shading properly, never could get the hang of shading while having the same image in my mind becoming reality). Will also sketch on paper, no color, just the outlines.
- some logo ideas
I know someone who uses 3Ds max to animate and model rather quickly, although she doesn't make perfect human characters. I wish I could be that quick with Maya, but then again I prefer Maya's rendering to Max's.
And thank you for the references, those will be useful for the comic and later on if I really can't find someone to make the storyboard.
Last edited by SilverFeather; 08-01-2013 at 05:40 PM.