Wow. That's pretty sweet looking, man. Good job.

I like it but.. it all looks too chrome.

it is chrome, what can I say? It's fun.

I like it! But I dunno, I downloaded blender once and got a few viruses. I dunno if it was the program, but I got the viruses after I downloaded it. Maybe it was the website. By the way, good work!

Cool, but I wouldn't go that far as to say Blender is better... I can achieve the same by dragging an Illustrator file to Photoshop and applying a chrome filter and reflection. Many before tried to say Corel Draw/Paint was better than Illustrator/Photoshop but now look at Corel, they can't even give it away for FREE! There are reasons why industry standards (software) exist in the design world. For instance look how long it took Adobe Indesign to even take a bite out of QuarkXPress... and even now 90% of the industry still uses Quark (even though some like me prefer Indesign) There are things that are standards for a good reason.

I think they're just tools in a tool box. But that said, I disagree with your assessment of those tools.

Corel is the finest suite of programs that money can buy. Adobe has its foot in the door, that's why they are the industry standard. Quark Xpress is falling by the wayside because they mishandled the program and Adobe busted tail pushing and developing InDesign. Besides, if you already use Illustrator and PS, it's just a logical decision to go with the program that integrates the best. InDesign does that flawlessly.

For digital painting you can't beat Painter, and for vector art CorelDraw is enormously more intuitive.

l disagree, Illustrator and Ps rocks

you didn't get viruses from blender... seriously, what?

Cool, but I wouldn't go that far as to say Blender is better... I can achieve the same by dragging an Illustrator file to Photoshop and applying a chrome filter and reflection.

that is false, actually... nothing true was said there.

Also, I wasn't serious about that blender is better thing, they're for totally different purposes, that's all... but don't forget that blender is free.

as far as placement, i'm not a fan of bottom-corner placement, but i think this would look good in the bottom left hand corner.

center looks awkward.
but i still gave it a high score.

OK Kem I broke down and downloaded Blender... being that it is a 3D software program... it can't be compared to Illustrator because Illustrator is not neccessarily a 3D prog (although with time you can acchieve some 3D-ness but very limited). Now if you were to compare Blender to Lightwave or Cinema 4DXL I'd say you were on the mark with the type of programs worthy to compare.

BTW I attempted to make a 3D version with your original gif of the marionette... the Chrome filter in PS CS wasn't the Chrome I was referring to I had meant the plug-in "Eye Candy 4000" Chrome filter which is in my PS CS (my bad for the confusion) I got some similiar results but not as purdy as yours being that it was 72 dpi when I dragged it from Safari.

Mr Dom... I agree with the statement about Painter... it is the best... but the Corel Draw/PhotoPaint statement... my first reaction was to ask you if you smoke peach flavor blunts... alot.
But then I thought well everybody's got their own taste. I guess my main concern with Corel was that it didn't follow the same shortcuts as the rest of the Mac platform (neither does Quark for that matter) and I am an Apple(Command)-C Apple-V guy, I use shortcuts for almost everything due to the way I was trained on the my first job... the boss said to me learn all the shortcuts or you won't be working here in a week... his reasoning was that using the menu bar was too time consuming and his biz was a fast-paced environment. I did try the Corell 11 Suite... it was a free download. I became aggravated by the shortcuts being different, plus the bezier tool (pen) wasn't as comfortable in my mouse hand in Corel... yeah it has some good features like text beveling... but other than that it was too time consuming to learn the ins-outs when I could accomplish a project very quickly in AI.

the illustrator-blender comparison was basically a joke. I still contend that no 2d software is going to get you anything as accurate or nice as raytracing. Oh, anyway, whatever. Blender has good 2D capability, and it's fast once you learn it.

(i havent read any of this , but had to comment about the font. sorry I couldn't pay attention to anything else. ahh umm, kemler. it's a bit hard to read @ that size. make it bigger or choose another. there are free type foundries online, check them out. I apoligise ahead of time, I cant help myself. knee-jerk reaction.)

^ & wow the illo is pretty neat. :o)