The Curse of the Bride of Dracula...

Larger 5250 x 1500 breakdown image.

...okay, so it's not the most original name, but that's partly the point as I originally wanted this image to hark back to some of the old Hammer vampire films from the 60's and 70's that I love so much.

She is the third in my series of Living Dead Girl characters - I'm planning on making more. When I originally started working on this image (way back) I wanted to create something that had a classic vampire feel to it. Part of it has turned out as I envisioned it and other parts developed more organically during the creation process. There is a lot that could be improved upon but I had to let go at some point otherwise it would never be finished. I'll take what I've learned from this experience, and it's been a lot I must say, and apply that to any future projects.

The final 3000 x 1500 image took around 84 hours to render. I'll possibly create an actual making of sometime in the nearish future, but in the meantime I've created a breakdown (below the finished image).

Until next time...

G

PS. I hope that you all have had a great Christmas and that you all have a fantastic New Year!!

A small update

If you right-click on the image and select open image in new tab/window it should open a larger 1600px version.

It's been a while since I've updated my blog - I've been quite busy with freelance work over the past months, so I haven't had too much time to work on my personal work. Fortunately, I've had a bit of time over the past month or so to do some work on my Living Dead Girl (number 3). It's mostly involved redoing the hair for her (which I'm still working on). I've also been able to render it properly with VRay since Hair-Farm now seems to fully support it. I've redone the cloth as well as textured it properly now.

I'm quite happy with the way she's turning out. The lighting is still very much a work in progress (though I do like the direction it's taking); along with quite a few other things that I'll touch up once I start putting the scene together - I'll hopefully start modelling an environment for her this coming week.

More to come...

G

Dressing her up...

I wasn't going to post this because the robe/cloth is still a very early work in progress, but I thought that I need to post something.

Anyway, just a quick render of where this character is heading; sans hair (I'll probably end up redoing more of the hair (that I posted earlier) than I intended as my idea or using morph targets with Hair-Farm didn't quite go as planned unfortunately).

The cloth still needs a lot of work:
- The way it's draped needs some attention as well as I want less of her breasts exposed
- I still need to add in seams, etc.
- The shader is also very temporary and there isn't a texture yet so that'll need addressing soon. I'll probably be adding lace trimming and some other delicate stuff.

I like where the lighting is heading as well - obviously it's just a quick test (her right eye looks rather weird at the moment). I still need to start working on the environment (here I come Maya). I've also created a small accessory for her, but will add that in at a later stage.

All that and some extra gooeyness...

G

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...

G