A new stylized character

I'm still working on my Living Dead Girl character - she's about 90% done, but felt like working on something a bit different for a change, so I began work on this stylized character about a week ago in my spare time. I also had a bit of downtime whilst working on 300: Rise Of An Empire at Cinesite so also managed to squeeze in some work on her there. And yes, I'm using Maya.

Most of the base geometry is done with the exception of the figure itself, which is still the low poly base mesh and is thus lacking detail and shape. I still need to add in small details like toe and finger nails and flesh out more of her forms and also give her proper ears. I want to keep her quite simple and not add too much anatomical detail. I've been really inspired by Paranorman and a few other films lately, so felt like doing something a bit more in that vain, though this won't be anywhere nearly as stylized as that.

I'm actually working on 3 characters at the moment; one I mentioned in a previous post (Living Dead Girl 4) which I've put on hold until I finish the 3rd (Living Dead Girl) and this character. I want both characters done for when I launch my new website.

More to come...

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She's hairy...

I started working on the hair a couple of weeks ago. I decided to splash out and buy Hair farm which I'm really happy with. The only real downside for me at the moment is that it doesn't fully support V-Ray (yet).  You can still render the hair with V-Ray but you need to use Max's default lights for the hair to render correctly. These images were rendered using a combination of Max's omni light's and V-Ray lights.

I'm pretty happy with the results so far. It's taken a reasonable amount of experimentation with modelling the hair to get the results that I want, but now that I (think I) know what's going on it should be pretty straight forward for any other hair that I do.

This is by no means the final hair as I'll have to change it to accommodate the final posed figure and garments. I'll quite possibly be changing the colour of the hair as well as tweaking the final hair shaders.

(These images are also a week or two old.)

More to come...

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More render tests...

I posted these to my deviantArt account a few days ago -  thought I should share them here as well.

Another one of many test renders that I've been doing (I'm enjoying V-Ray). The image on the right is rendered with GI and 2 lights (+ one for the eye highlight). The one on the left is the same but with no GI. Neither are using V-Ray Environment.

I'm mostly done with the sculpting (still might tweak one or two things here and there) and texturing - the bump map still has one or two areas that are inverted (the eyebrows which will be removed when I do the grooming and one or two moles, etc.).

I should be starting the hair and clothing for her soon, meaning that she'll actually start to look like a character.

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Render tests...

I started testing out VRay for the fist time in ages. Okay I lie, I tested  it on a earlier version of this model months back and she's changed a lot since then. It was quite a basic quick test only using a diffuse map and no SSS. But honestly, the last time I used VRay was back when it was free and still in Beta testing.

These are a few of the latest renders I've been testing. The first two in the row of four have GI enabled whilst the last don't, thus their more waxy quality.

This full figure one is the last one that I've done today. The shading is by no means finished, but I'm still really happy with these results. There's still a lot to do to her, mostly:

- Finish sculpting and cleaning up her anatomy;

- Add asymmetrical anatomical detail; 

- Her texturing (diffuse) is about 95% done - finish a few things here and there;

- Update and tweak secondary maps (glossiness, bump, etc.);

- Add hair (her eyebrows are only textured in at the moment but I'll be grooming those with a proper hair system as well);

- Pose her;

- Clothe her;

- Create environment;

- Render, render... and render...

More to come...

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Some new character stuff...

I have just finished a couple of months freelance work on some characters for a game trailer cinematic, so now I'm officially back to some of my own work for a bit.

This is what I started working on a while before I started the above mentioned work. Nothing too exciting, just a standard base nude figure for a character I'm working on (more on her at a later date). The nice thing about doing this base figure is, I can use her for multiple characters just by making a few model changes and texture tweaks, which will allow me to focus on the character. She's not going to be a real-time character either.

(edit: I have just realised that this base mesh was derived from an older model made a couple of years back that was never finished.  I've essentially adjusted a lot of the anatomy and proportions - I think I've also added in some extra topological detail as well. Looking back at that old one it's really quite bad and I think this one is quite an improvement over that... hopefully...)


The texture work is about 98% done - just a few small touch-ups here and there. At the moment I've got one 8K (8192x8192) texture for the skin and one 4K (4096x4096) texture for the eyes. I've left her eyebrows in for now as a guide for when I get to do the grooming of the hair later on.

As far as the sculpting goes, I'm only 3 subdivisions in as I'm still just fleshing out the shapes of the muscles and proportions, etc. She'll most likely be a lot less toned than she is now, so I'll be smoothing those muscles down a bit when I move on to higher subdivisions.

Hopefully I'll have more updates on the actual character soon...

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Female base head close-up and tweaks....

I just thought that I would post a close up view of the head. I made a few tweaks to the shape of the head and face.

More to come later.

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Anatomy tweaking

I've been working on all three of my current projects at the moment: Girl Bust, Punk Girl, and this my Female Base model. Nothing much to see here really, just some minor anatomy tweaks (again) before I move on to the next sub-div level (still on 3). I've scaled up her head a bit, along with a few other adjustments.

I'll post updates on the others over the weekend I think...

'til then.

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A small bit of work

I've been working on my base model on and off. She's still only on sub-division three, which would actually be sub-division 4 as my base mesh is more detailed than usual (see the wireframe here). I'm sticking to this level of detail for now until I have most of what's needed before sub-dividing her more.

I've also been working on my Punk Girl on and off. I need to swap out the old mesh with the new retopologised mesh in ZBrush so that I can bake the normal maps. I've been doing some tests by bringing the new retopologised  mesh into Zbrush, but I'm getting spiking which sucks ass (strangely enough I never had this problem with my female base mesh when I tweaked the mesh's topology and brought it back into Zbrush). I also tried re-projecting instead, setting the PA Blur to 8 as suggested, but that didn't help too much - still getting weird spikes in the ears, eyes and mouth areas. If it becomes too painful I might just bake the normals in xNormal.

Edit: For some reason the hand thumbnail seems to be a different colour to what it is meant to be?!?

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Polygroups

I haven't done too much work on her since my last update - I've just been refining some areas and concentrating on the base forms. I've only used  3 levels of subdivision so far, that also being partly due to my lowest subdivision being a bit higher poly this time around.

I've also decided to use polygroups for this mesh, I know they are nothing new but they make editing tricky areas like the fingers and toes far easier.

I should hopefully be starting something new soon as well. Whether or not it's with this female mesh or not I'll have to see. I'm also hoping to carry on working on my punk girl...

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New female base model

I  started a fresh base female nude model a couple of weeks back. I know I've made a few in the past but I wanted to correct some topology and add in some mesh detail to the base model before sculpting (ear, finger nail and toe nail detail). Doing this will also eliminate the need to go back and retopologise once I'm done. I've decided to go with a slightly higher detail base mesh, rather than the low poly one's that I have used in the past - I initially used the base mesh from one of my last base models and added in all the extra detail.

I also decided to give UVLayout a go. It's pretty good but takes a bit of getting used to the old school interface. However, there are loads of tutorial videos on the author's website. Just dig a bit and you'll find them.

I'll hopefully start building a character around her soon. Just not too sure what yet... hmm.

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