Illusionist Sketchbook
polycounter lvl 8
Hi,
This is my new character. The base mesh was created in Maya and Marvelous Designer before being rendered with ZBrush. The hair was done in FiberMesh.
Andor Kollar
www.kollarandor.com
This is my new character. The base mesh was created in Maya and Marvelous Designer before being rendered with ZBrush. The hair was done in FiberMesh.
Andor Kollar
www.kollarandor.com
Replies
If I may ask, for the shaved hair, did you bake it directly on the lowpoly head or did you use cards ? I'm asking because I'm tackling a character with some shaved hair and not yet sure how to handle this part.
http://kollarandor.com/gallery/soldier/
I upload a video from the character:
The head sculpted in ZBrush and final images rendered in 3ds Max with Mental Ray. I painted detailed SSS textures to building the right skin shader. The head has detailed geometry with great edge flow that appropriate for facial rigging and animation. The character also was modeled in real-world scale. For this character I used the face of Vincent Cassel the French actor as reference.
The character has complex and realistic high detailed eyes (eyeball, iris, cornea, pupil, wet part). These eyes bring life to the model. I used polygon hair for eyelashes and eyebrows. I think the eye reflection and the wet part on the eyelid and on the tear duct is important to achieve the realistic alive impression for a 3d character.
The base mesh contains almost only quads and the model has clean edge loops based geometry. It contains 14 890 polygons (triangles). Wireframe screenshot.
I made always carefully the UV maps, I think a very perfect UV map is the way for a very perfect texture.
The one last thing that actually makes eyes realistic is the "magnifying" refraction of the iris and pupil on the cornea, but as I've reasearched it's a quite complex phenomenon to achieve in real-time rendering. But since you used Mental Ray, that gets raytraced... and the rest is history, heh. Personally my experience with offline rendering is close to non-existent, so I don't know much about that because my models are always game models to be rendered in a real-time game engine. Kinda interesting you have the pupil as a separate object. I've always closed the hole to the eyeball. Does it help making it more realistic then, or something like that?
I'm using Blender as my primary modeling software, and it's pretty fast for UV unwrapping organic models. But the usual problem is that most of the time I'm getting smaller texel density for the face compared to the rest of the head. Your unwrap is something amazing I've achieved very rarely. Also, usually I tend to keep ears in the same head unwrap instead of separating them to avoid too many seams, but sometimes I separate them though.
The biggest artifacts come from corners of the mouth when baking normals, AO, curvature etc. Currently I have a character project with two characters, and they have their mouths just slightly open and eyes half-closed to get artifact free bakes (and I also get that nice smooth falloff for the ambient occlusion between the mouth and the mouth cavity). I also have plans for creating facial expressions for them, which also helps me to close the mouth and open eyes to have a proper neutral expression. Here is the quick render of them form Zbrush: http://i.imgur.com/dgQ6Jt4.jpg
Do you bake in Max as well?
How does your detailed SSS map you speak of look? Could you show it?
Really nice work man...
This is a rendered eye, in wireframe image you can see how I builded up from 3 parts the whole eye (eyeball+pupil+cornea). I used separate pupil because I think of the pupil dilation/animation. For in-game characters I use similiar eye system (eyeball+cornea). For example you can check my game character in Marmoset viewport and you can check how change the reflection of eye when I rotate the lights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=autkWsxnoGs
Of course you can use separate texture map for head to increase the texture resolution, I think Maya has very powerful and fast UV tools I like it very much. (Maya UV tools are much better than 3ds Max UV tools)
Some examples:
http://kollarandor.com/gallery/kuklov/
http://kollarandor.com/gallery/escaped-soldier/
When baking normal maps this is ordinary when somewhere artifacts appear, so don't worry about this, you can repair it in Photoshop manual.
here is Vincent's head with hair and body. Rendered in Marmoset Toolbag 3.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qKyVD
http://kollarandor.com/gallery/soviet-sergeant/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS_Rzexfwf4
Presentation video of the characters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QhFjF2Q1CE
I focused the face close-up details and I made some experiment with Arnold render using alShaders in Maya. The peach fuzz was made with XGen. The face details was sculpted in ZBrush and I painted the SSS textures in Mari.