Sketchbook: Dan Nacu

DanNC

Hello, I hope to learn a lot through this sketchbook, and will try to make the things I learn available as well.

I would like critique whenever possible, please.

I am a super stubborn learner, and despite watching a bunch of tutorials, I never seem to grasp key points without first-hand experience. I always learn best by FAILING very hard for YEARS and eventually learning a thing. This used to bother me a lot, but I'm trying hard now to work more and more with this lame handicap.

Currently working on a little "sketch" to practice hair cards. I'd like to do a few rapid fire studies rather than bog myself down with a long-form project.

SO, my latest realizations about hair cards (I MAY BE WRONG, PLEASE CORRECT ME IF YOU KNOW SOMETHING):

- The hair simulation for card creation (in xgen, blender, zbrush, etc...) is not the most important part of the process. I think, the most important thing to grasp in the hair sim is the messiness of the hair, the density of hair strands, and the thickness of the follicles. If your ref has very kinky curly hair, the hair sim should only slightly mimic that, as the actual curliness will be crafted into the card geometry during the grooming phase.

- The hair cards should have some sort of smoothing on while you place them. The fewer vertices/control points you have to deal with, the easier placing them will be. So I've been taking my poly strips, dividing them lengthwise about 4-5 times, and 1 time widthwise, then applying the subdiv modifier in Blender. I finally apply all modifiers. I'm planning on reducing geometry in Maya or maybe Houdini afterwards, to reduce the polycount if needed.

- Seems like if you want HIGH realism hair, you need to accept a HIGH polycount.

- The block in layer should be fairly smooth. Meaning, card normals should be more parallel rather than perpendicular among neighboring cards. I think this is most relevant with long hair where the overall mass of the hair is being blocked in.

- Hair card profiles should be slightly curved, otherwise you risk them looking flat.

I'm using Blender to crate and place the cards, and am rendering in Marmoset.

A note on Marmoset rendering hair cards: Turn off shadows.

I am currently on the first break-up layer. Still adjusting a bunch of stuff. Not using a normal map since baking that in Blender is a mystery.

Ref: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/71/5e/e3/715ee3f3e2f090ebb54a5a5aaca5f138.jpg

DanNC

Update on hair cards:

Probably super basic, but new to me, I discovered that plugging base color into specular map in Marmoset and using a medium grey will produce some nice looking highlights.

I'm noticing some issues, where I didn't bulk out the base of the hair enough, and if viewed from below, it looks sparse and kind of stringy/disorderly. I think I should have used curled hair cards sooner rather than using flat wavy ones for my break-up layer. For now though, I will save that as a lesson for later, since I want to move on.

I will add a few more curly cards, a few more of the think detail cards, and then start the edging/flyaway layer.

DanNC

Making a boot. Spent way too much time on this.

On the off chance someone sees this, when making a game res boot, do you usually keep the boot separate from the legs?

I have this boot done(ish), so now I will mirror it for the left leg. Great, so when it comes time to retopo, I would like to also mirror the retopo version, but then the end of the pant leg might be falling differently on one boot than the other, so the retopo would be slightly different. I imagine in this case I just leave the boot as a separate mesh? Not that it really matters for this project since it wont be animated, but just something I've been wondering about.

To anyone reading, have a great day/evening!