Modeling Women...
polycounter lvl 14
So, I recently noticed the Gender Bender contest over at Threedy and thought "Oh, that sounds cool." (If you don't know what it is it's where you take a character from a game, movie, tv show, etc. and turn it into a character of the opposite sex.) So I decided to take Francis from Left 4 Dead and make him into a female. I had it in my head that I wanted to give her tatoos and some other biker stuff. I started the model thinking it was gonna be fairly easy to model but I have had such a hard time with it it's not even funny.
I have attempted to model her at least ten+ times now. I've started with a plane, a box, cylinders, started from legs. started from torso, and man am I having trouble. Originally I was just going to make a base mesh and try to sculpt in Zbrush (which I also haven't really done before so that is an entirely new thing I will have to learn as well
) but now I want to do the high poly only in Max. Below are five of my attempts at doing this:
I used the same reference for every model. Not exactly the greatest but it's mainly just to reference and I wasn't following it exactly. I doubt it was the reference I chose and probably just my lack of experience with modeling women. Below is the concept I drew out for the character and as you can see, her stomach shows:
Since it shows, I really wanna have some good stomach detail. Also, I am straying away from big breasts as it is too common. The model may have bigger ones than the concept but not too much bigger. Well anyways I want to have here stomach look something like this:
Not TOO defined but enough for you to see some details and for it to look somewhat sexy. I also have a ton of trouble trying to get the flow from the breasts to the deltoid right.
While my reference and concept aren't the greatest, that is why I am posting. I was hoping you guys would be able to do paintovers, post links, and hopefully give as much advice as possible but maybe I am asking too much. Thank you for any help you may provide.
Mike
I have attempted to model her at least ten+ times now. I've started with a plane, a box, cylinders, started from legs. started from torso, and man am I having trouble. Originally I was just going to make a base mesh and try to sculpt in Zbrush (which I also haven't really done before so that is an entirely new thing I will have to learn as well
) but now I want to do the high poly only in Max. Below are five of my attempts at doing this:I used the same reference for every model. Not exactly the greatest but it's mainly just to reference and I wasn't following it exactly. I doubt it was the reference I chose and probably just my lack of experience with modeling women. Below is the concept I drew out for the character and as you can see, her stomach shows:
Since it shows, I really wanna have some good stomach detail. Also, I am straying away from big breasts as it is too common. The model may have bigger ones than the concept but not too much bigger. Well anyways I want to have here stomach look something like this:
Not TOO defined but enough for you to see some details and for it to look somewhat sexy. I also have a ton of trouble trying to get the flow from the breasts to the deltoid right.
While my reference and concept aren't the greatest, that is why I am posting. I was hoping you guys would be able to do paintovers, post links, and hopefully give as much advice as possible but maybe I am asking too much. Thank you for any help you may provide.
Mike
Replies
EDIT: After looking at it a bit more, I will try to stray away sphere-like breasts more, kinda like you did.
It's a tough job, but you're probably going to need to have lots of photos of women's asses (possibly nude) on your desktop as reference for hours or even days!
Man I hate this job sometimes.
http://www.arildwiro.com/tutorials/modelling/body/body01.html
It really does help.
Also why do all the women modelling tutorials i see feature really cartoony proportions? That is the most horrid way to learn
I'd skip that tut that Numo16 posted. It's not that great to be used as a base mesh.
AaronF3D - Oh yea, reference is a must. I've been looking at stomachs, full bodies, and various things like that. I learned a bit about female anatomy when I looked for refs for my concept (even though it probably doesn't show :S). I also recently began right click+saving a lot of images and it has definitely helped me out a bit. Would you mind maybe posting a wire of your model? I always like to compare my work with others.
EDIT: Sorry Aaron, just noticed you had a thread, taking a look now...
http://szejones.cgsociety.org/gallery/
http://szejones.com/
Although when ZBrushing breasts, I'd argue that you want little nipples occasionally when sculpting...
Any more than two nips is overkill, even for polycount ;D (quad-boob characters excluded)
Havok : looks like a good base to start with, although I'd probably align the hands with the rest of the arms a bit more. No big deal though. Get the head done and show some wires please. You win a cookie if you don't give her fish lips.
As for belts, I tend to just start with a cylinder with the caps cut off, surface-snap to the main mesh then extrude. Extruding along a spline is also handy, but I'm not a Max guy so can't help you there.
A sneaky detail trick you can do after that to add some trims, is to add an Edit Poly modifier on top of your TurboSmooth, grab an edge loop selection and do "Create Shape From Selection" in the EPoly Edit Edges rollout. Then you can make the resulting spline shape renderable, and give it a thickness. Instant trim!
You can also use those resulting splines as guides for using Path Deform (WSM) modifier, or the Spacing Tool to distribute smaller detail meshes along the highpoly shape, neat and perfectly accurate.
For pointed ends... uh... just edit the base mesh to be pointy at the ends? o_O
Awesome thanks for sharing! Never used the Create Shape from Selection before and though i'd usually do this by other means its definitely got good potential!