Zombie Chick WIP!

Frump

Hey guys. After all the talk about WAYWO lately and how people miss genuine threads, I decided to start one of my own.

It's a female zombie based on a concept by John Grello, which can be seen here. >Link<

I'm at the texturing phase, but I'll post some of the progress shots here just so you can see how it's come along. It's currently sitting at 9150 tris.

The texture is pretty early right now, only diffuse and alpha; no spec. Initially I was intimidated by the amount of skin I would have to texture, but I think it's working out. I'm not using photo sources so far on the skin and I'm probably not going to. Every time I do a new project I seem to be painting more and more and hardly using photos at all. Much more Freedom.

The face looks bad but the pose is not final. The jaw is hooked up to a cluster so I can move the mouth around. I'm also going to make some blend shapes for it. There's still some artifacts in the normal map that I have to paint out. Other than that I just have to keep adding details and refining; turning her into more of a Zombie. All crits welcome.
Old:
WIP image
Block in:
Final High Poly:
Bake:

Click for megasize:

onionhead_o

nice chr. clean bake too. but she looks more like a vampire then a zombie to me. i think its the skin tone and the eyes.

FlavaFly

Id like to see some detail in the diffuse around the areas where there is damage on the legs. The mesh detail exists and looks great, but needs to have some change in tone at least to sell it in the final render. Its a zombie after all, get some gore in there!!

Ferg

them some gloriously short shorts. Right now the skin just looks like a solid blocked in color though, I recommend doing some photo projections just for color variation at the least, its amazing how much you lose when you dont have those subtle tones.

Titus S

Exaggerate the expressions!!!!!!!!!!!1

Looks good, it just doesn't feel zombie yet... More like a trailer trash hoe on acid.

serialkiler

take out is bra and that will look awsome LOOL

rollin

the face is the biggest problem right now I would say. The rest of the body looks already quite good

the only other thing that bugs me are these cloth moth holes or what it should be.. it looks like acid splattered all over her..

Frump

Onionhead_O: Do you mean in the concept or in the model? The concept was titled "zombie bitch" and accompanied by another zombie image. As for the model, it's still super early on the texture, but it will look more like a Zombie.

Flava Fly: For sure! Most of it is just base texture right now, I think what I spent the most time one so far was the pants of all things.

Ferg: Pretty much is it base colour right now with some noise overlays to break it up. I painted in some subtle reddish pink tones but I will do more, yellows and blues. I'll consider using photos, but I don't know, the last few times I used them it was a hassle trying to get rid of the lighting information and make it look good.

Titus S: Well I guess that's a good thing? More zombie to come!

serialkiller: Haha, that would be interesting. I could go back and bake a nude version if I wanted.

rollin: Thanks. Yeah, I also see how the face is not working right now. Definitely going to address that. Interesting point about the cloth. I actually generated it procedurally with Zbrush surface noise so it's not perfect, but looks good. what should I do to make it better? Alphas with loose threads? At this point I could actually just redo all the holes on the alpha instead of keeping the ones from the bake, so let me know.

Thanks for all the crits guys! I appreciate it.:poly142:

rollin

It's not that easy if you want to make it look correct.
Because every hole/tear will change the way the folds look like

but to go one step after the other..what should they represent? how did they get in there ..


btw.. maybe try to change the eyes first .. this could improve the face already

serialkiler

like i told u take is bra off and no one will notice errors
just kidding ^^

Frump

Okay, here's an update for tonight. I made it more zombie by popular demand.

Should it be more zombie still? Less? Any suggestions?

Things left to do: Work on the face, the hair, dirty up her clothes, maybe fix the tears on the shirt, add dirt other than blood, and stuff I can't remember. I'm also considering making a small backdrop for her, if I didn't mention that yet.

All crits welcome as usual. Thanks for looking.

Michael Knubben

One thing that really bothers me is that the holes in her shirt don't influence the folds at all. They look like nothing more than an afterthought.
Also, the front cut in her shirt is far too sharp, have you considered an alpha?
Texturewise, I'd add a lot of bruising, as well as some blue/purple around her eyes. Veins will make things creepier as well.
edit: Rollin brings up a good point: where do these holes comes from? Right now, they look like moth holes, which would mean the clothes would be older and dustier anyway. If they're meant to be tears, they would be much thinner and longer, and you might get some L-shaped flaps. Using Zbrush noise for this is a nice trick (and I really do love noise for that sort of thing!), but it doesn't really work for this type of damage.

Sirdelita

MUCH better! I would suggest having some of that blood from he mouth drip down her neck and chest maybe?

JohnnyRaptor

and add more blue and green to the blood colour, its too red

serialkiler

yahhvthe blood is the same color as shirt ^^

achillesian

how did the shirt get torn and tattered like that in the back, it looks like a shotgun blast did that, maybe make a hole in her torso?

Nizza_waaarg

cool update mang, like where it's headed. I really think making the pupil's themselves white and cataract-ey (similar to the original illo) would really help the character, not digging the yellow pupils atm.

just a leetle bit of dirt buildup around the lower legs/feet might be nice, not too much tho. I like how straight forward and clean (?) the character looks overall. And a little brusing and darker areas on her skin would be a nice thing to add as mightypea said.

...oh and more blood around the mouth/neck area too please


edit: how;d you do those cool holes in the shirt high poly btw? Some of them are a little out of place but i like how you pulled them off anyways ^^

Frump

MightyPea: Okay, cool. I have gotten the shirt crit a lot now so I will change it. Not gonna lie, I was just being lazy about it and using a quick fix through the whole process, I should have known better. I'll try and make the rips and tears make sense and also vary up the edges in the middle. I'll also try to change the shirt to make it as if the folds are being influenced by the tears.

Definitely going to put in some more bruises, veins and blemishes. As well as more skin tone variation. There's a lot there in the texture but it faded as I kept desaturating the base more, so I'll keep working on it.

serdelita: For sure, I'll spread the blood around some more. Thanks.

serialkiler, JohnnyRaptor: Thanks guys, I'll definitely work on that. At the moment it is just solid red, so I'll vary it up. Hunks of skin and brain chunks and dirt caught in it maybe.

achillesian: That would be a cool idea, but a bit too large scale of a change to make at this point. Hopefully the cloth will make more sense in the next update.

Nizza_Waaarg: Thanks. I will try the whited out eyes again. They are yellow because the white faded against the old bright skin colour. Now that it's more gaunt it'll probably fit in better.

This tutorial is how I did the rips. It actually is in part what made me go forward with this character. I was trying to decide between two projects and then this tutorial popped up and gave me a reason to do the zombie, so I could try it out. In Zbrush you end up with a mask and then hide, so if you take your time and plan out the tears you could make it more convincing.

Thanks again guys, lots of good crits here. I'll go back to work on it. Not sure I'll have much time to work tonight though. Cheers.:)

rsharma

this update looks alot better. You should change the color of the shirt, give it more of a cloth feeling. The face is also looking kinda funny can't she be a semi attractive zombie? I liked her better with her mouth closed. Try closing her mouth a bit and rotating her head to the left or right. great progress so far, looking forward to the next update.

Frump

rsharma: Thanks. I already kind of changed the shirt colour. not drastically, I'll keep playing with it. I want it to match the colour in the concept. I still have a lot of texturing to do on the face, so maybe? Although it's all just going to make her look more beat up. I'm definitely going to work on the facial pose. Right now it's just a jaw movement because I set up a cluster handle. I'm going to make some blend shapes, maybe a facial bone rig since I've never done my facial rigs that way.

I haven't had a ton of time to work on this in the last few days but here's what it's looking like after the bits of time I've put in. I whited out the eyes more, added more blood, tested some veins, added even more bruising and redid the tears in the shirt. The way it's posed is breaking the illusion that it's cloth and that's not fixable just by alpha alone.

Still to do: toe nail polish, dirt on clothes/lower legs, detail the shirt, detail the face, make the veins make sense and add them everywhere, experiment more with the skin tones, make the eyes look more bloodshot, detail the hair and detail the bra.

Thanks for looking.:)

Rojo

Put those veins everywhere man, they look sweet. The rib wound could use improvement, it's fairly unrealistic and looks too shallow.

Celes

i like the veins and wounds! but the base skin is kind of pink in my opinion. maybe make it a bit greenish?

BeserK

I really like the pink skin, looks like some kind of cadaver bruising, very cool!
The blood around her face and hands looks a little "photoshopped" maybe break it up with some splatmarks or something?
nice job!

Shiv

What about the seam running down the middle of her back?

Frump

Tim Deneau: Good to know the veins are convincing, they were just a test, no basis in correct anatomy right now. I'll probably improve the look of the ribs wound, it's been bugging me.

Celes: Perhaps, I'll play with it some more but I want to stick to the original concept too. And green is a bit cheesy as a colour for zombies.

BerserK: Yeah for sure, gotta work more on the bloody areas. I don't know what I was doing when making it, forgetting about dripping, splattering and basic fluid dynamics.

Shiv: All in good time! I can't do everything at once.

Thanks for the comments guys, everything helps. I want to have this finished soon but it's hard to find time, so we'll see.

Fireflights

I think the pink skin tone and lack of "fleshular destruction", if you will, is what is preventing this from screaming "zombie" at me right now. The cuts and bruises are a good start, but when I think of zombies, there's usually something very wrong with them (serious, deep wound(s)...rotting flesh...severely torn up or deformed face, etc).

If nothing else, I'd certainly add some green/yellow tones to her skin, and maybe make her wounds look less red-vibrant, and maybe more brown. While she is supposed to be dead and gross, I think the blood around her mouth and on her hands can look more fresh - after all, she's going after the healthy-and-living, eh? :P

Frump

Fireflights: Fair points. I didn't make her more dismembered or destroyed because I wanted to match the concept. I've worked more on the blood and skin, this better? Thanks for the crits.

Here's what it looks like after a few days of on and off work.

jmt

The was I see it, the shirt in the drawing is flawed, but isn't really distracting in that image, but in your model it seems like it's a little more flawed. Its way harder to hide errors in models than paintings. It stretches up higher on the bottom and sort of curves into the armpit on the top in the painting. Also the hands are sort of the same. Kind of an awkward posing, sort of stylistic looking in the painting, but doesn't translate into a model as well. Just my opinion, but the shirt to me seems like the obvious flaw in the image. I think that the shirt adds a lot to your model, and if you removed it, its just a zombie in underwear. Maybe I'm the only one who sees it this way. Another thing is the lighting. It looks weird with the bright blue everywhere, especially on the hair (which also looks like sculpting on flat brown)
I really like where the texturing is going, though some seams are a bit obvious. I don't know how avoidable that is. I also really like the sculpting on the legs. I think that this is by far your coolest looking model, and if you brought the quality of the flaws I mentioned up to the level of some of the other things about it this model could be really awesome. Good day.

Frump

After a very long time away from this I finally went back to it and got it finished. I had completed the texturing a few weeks after my last post in this thread but never got around to posting an update in here.

Also, in the mean time I made a pedestal for it that doesn't actually work well for presenting because it's really wide. It was really tedious cutting out all of the rock shapes too. I also toyed around with the idea of having a dog in a bag in her right hand too, which I got mostly done, I was retopo'ing the bag and the dog.
Bonus images: Pedestal, Dog in a bag

Back then, I hit a huge roadblock with the lighting and rendering. I tried 3 different Maya real-time shaders, Mental Ray and Marmoset Toolbag 1.0 with dozens of different lighting setups, but I could never achieve the look I wanted. Since the new version of Toolbag was released I went and tried to render it in ther with custom light setups now supported. BAM! I got the kind of results I wanted right away. So here it is. Crits and comments welcome as always.:)

Click for megasize:

Ack Master

i do like the pose, girls got no ass