Indiana Uploaded: Who's Your Favorites?

Thanks for recognizing my efforts to cross axis of experience with the viewer, invite them to be more of a participant really- Yes, with the Billy Goats and Woodpecker names, I wanted to take animals that, really nobody should ever afraid of, and then kind of put them into a new context, make you re-evaluate what you're comfortable with... So the combination of aural recall and visual stimulation puts the audience in a place of "oh i know what that animal sounds like! Oh and woodpeckers! Yeah I know what that sounds like, I even know why!" and simultaneously "Hey, that's... that's not supposed to make that sound! But I hear it!"
Plus with the big gaping mouth, it's inevitable you're going to imagine SOME kind of bleating noise coming from that thing. The chronological indicators of a sequence of events can be seen with a still oily and black-smoking fire, probably still burning off the paint and grease and rubber from the vehicle that caught a few stray rounds, leaked, and got touched off by, oh, an errant tracer. The boots, in the foreground, are still p- (oh. i just realized i never replaced those placeholder boots with the boots i was going to use... ) still posed splayed out, rigor mortis hasn't pulled the toes straight up yet- that guy just fell down.
The brass on the ground is still hot, as if whoever just fired belted out a good long drag, whatever he was shooting at was close. Yes, again with the tree, okay guys, ya got me, Next one will have good trees... I gave the background more warmth than the foreground, as if to say "you don't want to be here. You want to run off towards those buildings back there. you do not want to be here."
And in the foreground, the only warmth is from off frame, saying again, anywhere but here. I blew out and smashed down the lighting so you almost feel like you've got to squint at this, that first-time-seeing-the-sun-today feel, in order to- rather unsettlingly- let you feel what the mutants might be feeling, with their eyes adjusted for darkness.

Zeb-
23:35- I appreciate ya, thanks for the kudos, I chose to do mainly 3d because I knew with 2d I'd have to commit to everything I worked on any longer than, oh, half an hour. If I wanted a change, it was going to take many hours to fix or replace or just completely remake whatever I changed. Your recommendation to run the 'goats through maybe one more smooth to get rid of the poly sequin look in some areas was completely valid, and though the initial response/joke i made was "If I hit 3 and mental ray viewport smooth these guys, my laptop will catch fire and start singing." Looking back I realize i didn't actually have to tesselate the geometry, just smooth the normals or the smoothgroups a bit, I forgot the exact verbage but basically make a faceted model look smooth shaded by pushing a button somewhere and yanking a slider somewhere else and waiting. I think. Heh.

Zeb-
23:14- Again thanks for the compliments, though as usual I'm looking back over the process and thinking of every minute I could have shaved off the creation of this ugly, ugly scene.
I had to pack up and leave my desktop, where Zbrush is installed, and I'd only have my laptop, without zbrush on it (mac) so I quickly hit the main notes of importance- the hands, the face, some body geo, and posing/posturing. I started off with zspheres in Zbrush, I still haven't caught up with the bandwagon and i'm using an older version, before zspheres 2.0 (ZOMG sweet) - I made the basic armature and pushed and poked til I got a rough shape I wanted, ran a few more divisions over it, and started polysculpting, like i said taking care to define the key areas that would give a read with lighting or sillouhette. Everything else was a bunch of mashed potatos, in terms of sculpted detail- placeholder that I wanted to paint over and just use as vague placement/lighting reference later. Transpose master is great, but I've had more experience with the FFD lattices in MAX so i used those for turning the limbs and posing the character. I'd hate to 'ruin the magic' or 'show my hand' or whatever, but it's one mutant model, dup'd 3 times and placed in such a way that you never really see enough of them to see the echos of their form. Everything in the scene except the particle stuff (smoke, clouds) is 3d, and with now 2 comments on the tree I realize that's one thing i probably absolutely could not cut corners on.