Glad you like it I think you're on the path to getting some great results, you just need to get the specular in there as well as softening/colouring the shadows (both in the hair and in other places) a bit. Look at the way Brave did their hair for some shader inspiration, such as this one, 28 seconds in.
That's going to look really good when you combine the new hair with the new skin + fuzz.
A friend pointed out that the lips look like they are a bit too flat. Even with lipstick you'd still have a few creases, and here are some nice subtle creases at the corner of the mouth but the middle of the bottom lip looks very soft. Could just be a lack of specular though...
Okay I lied, this is some color correction, a very slight secondary specular, new facial fuzz, and a second flyaway layer.
Also here is a comparison picture. I don't know what happened to the ones I was using when I tried this the first time, and there wasn't a portfolio shot in those bunch anyway. I just pulled these down off facebook. Sorry about the instagram filters.
In the past I have used zbrush, then exported the fibermesh as curves. Then I would import the curves into Maya, and assign them Maya native HairSystem (nHair). I would use those controls to control the hair.
For this project I wanted a larger volume of hair but more control, so I needed more curves than previously. I ran into a lot of problems importing that number of curves and applying them into a system. Before 1 curve would control 20-30 hairs, but this one would have been 1 curve for 4 or 5.
So instead I did the whole hair system in Zbrush Fibermesh. Then I exported the system as geometry, just a straight .obj.
By going though the geo with a smooth brush you can get very fine ends, and using an inflate brush gives you thicker roots etc.
The hair shader is a vray 2sidedMtl with a dark diffuse with small opacity. Where the light shines though the second diffuse is a lighter color.
The 2sidedMtl was put into a blendMTL with a reflective material. The reflective material had no IOR or fresnel. Instead, The blend amount was controlled by a fresnel ramp put into the blend slot, and I controlled the IOR from there.
And as an EDIT, I used this shader instead of the VrayHairMTL because the VrayHairMTL I believe takes shortcuts to make the hair render faster, but makes it much, much more noisy.
It does render way faster though. These hairs (about 4 million polygons in them) were rendering with GI, AO, and final lighting in about 8 hours, whereas the head by itself renders in about 30 min...... so I might go back to the vrayhairMTL.
Thanks for that detailed explanation. That's insane to think that it takes that long compared to the head :O
I'm just starting out with V-Ray myself so I will be keeping an eye on this thread. Did you jump straight into rendering human skin or did you start with rendering products like iPhones?
I started trying to clay renders of my models, and then progressed to trying to do a portrait with skin. Actually that was my wifes portrait, that was the first one I tried about 1 year or a little more ago.
Vray is pretty easy once you get used it, no harder or worse than the current PBR/PBL engines, like marmoset2.
I suppose that projects like iphones etc. would be a good introduction, but starting with skin doesn't seem like it would be that much different as far as starting out goes. It's a bit harder, and you have to be a lot more balanced as you work, but you're still going to learn all the same vray concepts. Lighting, shading, filters, noise, caustics, etc.
1 - Here is the basemesh - the head we will be creating hair for.
2 - This tutorial is not about how to use Fibermesh, but for the uninitiated, simply mask out any areas which you would like to create hairs from. My personal strategy for creating hairs in large systems is to do them one small portion at a time. Here I mask off a very small area at the roots.
3 - Now use Zbrush Fibermesh to generate the fibers. These are the settings I use. Setting 1 in the below image determines the number of fibers (hairs) generated. I set this number low to avoid creating a large number of hairs at once, since we will work in small portions. Setting 2 is the profile. It is very important to use a profile of 2 or higher, because we will be doing operations on these later which will require thickness. For very thin fibers, there is no need to use more than 3 in the profile. Setting 3 determines the number of bends in each hair. For long hair, maximize this number - using too few segments will result in visible straight edges in your hair system.
4 - This is how it should look.
5 - Using the Fibermesh tools, model your hair into position.
6 - Rinse and Repeat. Continue using small segments to complete your fibermesh hair. For this hair, I have used some larger areas and larger numbers of hair underneath, closer to the skull, to fill out the hair. Then on top, I have created many smaller individual systems to give it a unique, full look.
7 - Using Fibermesh, use many single strands to create 'flyaway' hairs.
8 - When you are done creating your hairs, save out a backup file. Now combine all your hairs down into a single subtool.
You will notice that all the strands become immediately thinner, and are hardly visible in the viewport. This is because when the fibermesh subtools are combined they are converted into geometry. They have little to no thickness. Before we can use them in a render, we will have to correct this. To demonstrate how to use modeling tools to generate thickness, I will use the example of an eyelash.
____________________
PART 2 - Thickness
9 - The below picture is straight fibermesh. It has apparent thickness.
10 - And here are the lashes converted into geo (by being combined with another subtool.) Notice how thin they are.
11 - In the Zbrush tool menu, with your hair subtool selected, scroll down to the deformation submenu. In the submenu, we will give the hairs thickness by using the 'inflate' option. Very small values are needed. For these eyelashes I chose a value of .15.
12 - These are the thickened eyelashes, but we are not done yet. These lashes are uniform from the base to the tip. Real lashes (and hair) have wider roots and thinner tips.
13 - Using the inflate brush on a very low setting (1) inflate the roots of the lashes or hairs(2). Using the smooth tool, smoothing the tips of the lashes will deflate them (3). You can use the inflate brush to reduce the width of the lashes tip, but you will run the risk of negatively inflating them, so that the geo turns inside out. This is not possible using the smooth brush to reduce a hairs width.
14 - When you are done modeling, you are ready to export. Before you export, be sure to go into the tool --> polygroups option and combine the entire tool into a single polygroup. Having tools in multiple polygroups on export can cause errors when you import into other programs. There are other ways to solve this problem, this is just one solution.
16 - Import your geometry into Maya. Select the geometry. There are two things that we must do to all .OBJ files before we are ready to apply a material and render. The first thing is to go into the objects attributes editor (typically on the right side of the screen in Maya.) Here, we must turn on 'Visible in Reflections' and 'Visible in Refractions'.
17 - The second step for importing an .OBJ into Maya is to go into the 'NORMALS' Menu. With the OBJ selected, press 'unlock normals' (1), and then 'soften edge'(2). This will turn all the edgs of the hair (or any other geometry selected) into soft edges, rather than the hard edges that Maya imports.
18 - Your geometry should now look natural. Assign a shader to the material and you are ready to...
19 - ...render.
20 - Follow parts 2 and 3 to export the hair system from zbrush, and import it into Maya or another package. Your hair is ready to render. Here is the hair we created in part 1:
beautiful likeness, but TBH i would have gone (if i had your skill ) for a warmer image. Imo the instagram filter images looks more real than your render.
I made a little ajustment to explain my point, hope you don't mind :
Your work is really awesome, find the right lighting and it'll be stelar !
Thank you for taking the time to do that. While I admit I'm not a good lighter, and actually I'm pretty bad at it, I really approached this knowing I was going to do low lighting. I like the gloomy, sorta moody effect. I think the high key lighting is much more average for portraits, but I just didn't feel it was right for this piece. I'm sure most people disagree with me, I've gotten a couple comments on it - but that was my thinking.
amazing result!
ysalex I completly agree on your choice for the lighting. Not because it's more beautyful. But it feels more real and honest as a portrait.
congrats
I'm learning to become a character artist in the game industry and I've found your thread the most inspiring and helpful to my progress.
I'll just want to ask a technical question though. Referring to the 19. page of this thread of yours I noticed that I got some slight shading errors when applying the baked normal map for my original quad version of the mesh. I followed all the steps you adviced and I got a great normal map for the triangulated version, thanks to you. Beautifully smooth results, even though my LP head model for this normal map test was somewhat low poly.
I also want to rig and probably even animate my characters, so the quad version is always needed, yes. Luckily I can triangulate my quad version again and getting smooth results as I had with the triangulated one straight after baking. I just don't know how it will affect to the weighting of the rig. So, do you have any experience with this?
Hi fourtynights, somehow I missed your question before. My guess is that when you import the mesh into marmoset (or whatever engine), that the engine is flipping the quad the opposite direction of the way it was flipped when you 'triangulated' it in your modeling app. Sometimes even on a quad mesh you have to force the correct tri-orientation on quads by splitting them yourself. You can do this after you have your animations etc. in place, it shouldn't change anything, so animate with the quad mesh, and then when you are ready for final, split any problem quads yourself. There are probably more elegant ways of dealing with it, but this is how I have done it in the past.
___________________
Can't share what I am working on, but did this warm-up sketch this morning. Likeness (poor likeness) and a focus on the planes of her head. No detail what-so-ever, just a base, and a texture projection at the end.
There was a cool unused outfit from a project I worked on that I want to render, so here is the first lighting/hair test. Not sure if it will be full body or upper torso only yet. Model is old model of my wife with new texture and some changes.
Also I have to say that I bought GMH2 for hair. What is here doesn't look great, first try at it, but it saves SO much time, so anyone needing a hair solution I absolutely suggest it. This is my first revision, took about 30 minutes to make in zbrush and get into Maya, it is absolutely dead simple and really powerful, and from here it will be much quicker to iterate on top of this, so anyways forgive me, yeah, but I really love this program.
Lighting is okay, but I might want to change it up, going to get the rest of the outfit in Maya now.
Wow, I haven't peeked at this thread for a little but I'm glad I looked again. Your attention to detail is amazing and your work literally blows my mind. That portrait of your wife is my favoritetist ever. Really inspirational.
how good is GMH2 at rendering back down to a plane? like if i wanted to make a bunch of planes, that generated strands, could i then render those strands back down to the planes?
Lee that was my first thought too, but unfortunately its not supported. I read that guy(guys?) behind it is thinking about adding this, but my guess would be if it ever shows up it wont be for awhile.
Great work as usual, only thing is, Im not sure how the outfit is put together. Is the silver top part tucked under or over the blue part? Are they sewn together? Is this a two piece outfit? Lastly, have you considered adding a hem to the bottom of the skirt?
Lee that was my first thought too, but unfortunately its not supported. I read that guy(guys?) behind it is thinking about adding this, but my guess would be if it ever shows up it wont be for awhile.
Charles do you have a reference for something you thought would look nice? Dress is definitely a WIP but I dont feel like I have a handle on it. Appreciate the crit, thank you.
Lee, it occured to me that I read it on polycount, in the GMH2 news comments.
"...it's a pity that there isnt any use of this script for Games yet. But I am planning to somehow make it possible that to bake the hair onto the original polygon meshes 's texture ( diffuse, spec and normal channel ) . If everything goes well , I will do it in next version of GMH."
So yeah, seems like it could be tentative at best and a long way off. Too bad. Have you done any fibermesh experiments baking down to alpha cards? I keep thinking about it, im sure someone has tried.
I'd go with the first outfit design. Overall it's more creative design and because it's more flattering, it's more convincing - the stripes and tight bust design of the new one makes it look too much like you're trying to emphasise how she's not a typical skinny girl, which is already really clear.
That said I really love the new outfit's folds - the angles look more natural, and fewer folds make it look like the dress fits better.
The new outfit reads more traditionally (and clearly)as "A dress and a jacket", but I think the first one was a bolder choice in that it felt like a hybrid of some kind at first glance. I guess it really boils down to what direction you want the clothes to go down.
I'll look through my fashion folders and see if I can find something similar to what you had. I'll PM you if I find anything. The fold work is really nice on the new one too. More marvelous experiments?
It is marvelous, yeah. I have a love/hate relationship with it, so fast, such great results, but super un-intuitive and if you need any decent amount of simulation it moves soooooo slow. But amazing for concepting and/or basemeshes, so I suppose more love than hate.
If you have anything, I'd love to see it. Thanks man I appreciate the help.
Love the clothing you model for your characters, got a reall cool kind of retro feel too it, dont see alot of portfolios with clothing like yours well done . Super inspiring thread man keep up the good work.
Thanks kend, I got the upper part of this cut from Jackie Kennedy. Still will probably go with a different dress though.
Here are some lighting and render tests, and a high-res of my favorite lighting test thus far.
Did a lot of correcting of the face, pulled the lip and jaw back, changed the shape of the under-neck, other stuff. reposed her arms and worked on the wrist joints, not sure if the pose makes 100% sense feel free to let me know.
So yeah, seems like it could be tentative at best and a long way off. Too bad. Have you done any fibermesh experiments baking down to alpha cards? I keep thinking about it, im sure someone has tried.
I had tried it, but never with any success. It's probably the biggest thing missing in the hair pipeline, and if GMH2 can sort it out then they'll have probably the biggest/best niche product.
I use hair farm for generating planes in max, and it does a good job of that. It also does a good job of generating the actual hair if i want to do a full on render, but still baking from hair to planes is missing in functionality.
I feel like i should comment on the actual work here lol... It's all very good man, the cloth is very believable (even if i'm not a fan of the overall style). The skin has a kind of weirdness to it though, it pops a little too much from the overall composition, like maybe it could do with a little more subsurface to it, or a little less wrap lighting to help shade it better.
this is looking really good man , been following this thread for a bit a couple of point from my end :
i really like the clothing style on this most recent one, altho i liked the white stripe as in a previous update. the hair im not quite feeling it, hair is extremely difficult to pull i admit, this one reads very noisy and doesnt feel like hair , maybe its the shader and the lightning and i know its wip.
Other than that no crits from me, this is looking REALLY good !!
I like E and H. I think that dress is simple but also very interesting/realistic. I guess the subtle detail is what I really like. Nice work here as always man, I think the knuckle on the left thumb need a little more love.
F - My girlfriend has the exact dress, and the material definition is spot on. It's so life like. The skin is some of the best I have seen. You're making such amazing progress Ysalex, it's a pleasure to watch!
Ooo some more Ysalex fun! Stunning progress so far so cannot really comment
After for helping you out on choosing I'd say F is a solid idea with the cosmos design on the dress as it add some great contrast when viewed from afar as well as up close. But I also would like to see some logo/manufacture label that you've played about with in designs A, B and C.
Nice works man.
Regarding the skin of the leg and arm.
Maybe these images could help you ?
Not sure is it common but normally the innerside of the forearm is light than the one on the outer side like the image above. Maybe bcos of uv exposure for the sun.
Replies
[ame="
Here is the updated skin and skin detail, with some skin fuzz, with the old hair unfortunately:
A friend pointed out that the lips look like they are a bit too flat. Even with lipstick you'd still have a few creases, and here are some nice subtle creases at the corner of the mouth but the middle of the bottom lip looks very soft. Could just be a lack of specular though...
Also here is a comparison picture. I don't know what happened to the ones I was using when I tried this the first time, and there wasn't a portfolio shot in those bunch anyway. I just pulled these down off facebook. Sorry about the instagram filters.
Did you use the standard hair and fur modifier in max or an external plugin?
In the past I have used zbrush, then exported the fibermesh as curves. Then I would import the curves into Maya, and assign them Maya native HairSystem (nHair). I would use those controls to control the hair.
For this project I wanted a larger volume of hair but more control, so I needed more curves than previously. I ran into a lot of problems importing that number of curves and applying them into a system. Before 1 curve would control 20-30 hairs, but this one would have been 1 curve for 4 or 5.
So instead I did the whole hair system in Zbrush Fibermesh. Then I exported the system as geometry, just a straight .obj.
By going though the geo with a smooth brush you can get very fine ends, and using an inflate brush gives you thicker roots etc.
The hair shader is a vray 2sidedMtl with a dark diffuse with small opacity. Where the light shines though the second diffuse is a lighter color.
The 2sidedMtl was put into a blendMTL with a reflective material. The reflective material had no IOR or fresnel. Instead, The blend amount was controlled by a fresnel ramp put into the blend slot, and I controlled the IOR from there.
And as an EDIT, I used this shader instead of the VrayHairMTL because the VrayHairMTL I believe takes shortcuts to make the hair render faster, but makes it much, much more noisy.
It does render way faster though. These hairs (about 4 million polygons in them) were rendering with GI, AO, and final lighting in about 8 hours, whereas the head by itself renders in about 30 min...... so I might go back to the vrayhairMTL.
I'm just starting out with V-Ray myself so I will be keeping an eye on this thread. Did you jump straight into rendering human skin or did you start with rendering products like iPhones?
Vray is pretty easy once you get used it, no harder or worse than the current PBR/PBL engines, like marmoset2.
I suppose that projects like iphones etc. would be a good introduction, but starting with skin doesn't seem like it would be that much different as far as starting out goes. It's a bit harder, and you have to be a lot more balanced as you work, but you're still going to learn all the same vray concepts. Lighting, shading, filters, noise, caustics, etc.
EDIT: It can be found on this page too as well: http://www.yurialexander.com/charactersmain/fibermeshmaya-tutorial/
Hopefully this is useful to someone:
____________________________________________
PART 1 - GENERATING HAIR
1 - Here is the basemesh - the head we will be creating hair for.
2 - This tutorial is not about how to use Fibermesh, but for the uninitiated, simply mask out any areas which you would like to create hairs from. My personal strategy for creating hairs in large systems is to do them one small portion at a time. Here I mask off a very small area at the roots.
3 - Now use Zbrush Fibermesh to generate the fibers. These are the settings I use. Setting 1 in the below image determines the number of fibers (hairs) generated. I set this number low to avoid creating a large number of hairs at once, since we will work in small portions. Setting 2 is the profile. It is very important to use a profile of 2 or higher, because we will be doing operations on these later which will require thickness. For very thin fibers, there is no need to use more than 3 in the profile. Setting 3 determines the number of bends in each hair. For long hair, maximize this number - using too few segments will result in visible straight edges in your hair system.
4 - This is how it should look.
5 - Using the Fibermesh tools, model your hair into position.
6 - Rinse and Repeat. Continue using small segments to complete your fibermesh hair. For this hair, I have used some larger areas and larger numbers of hair underneath, closer to the skull, to fill out the hair. Then on top, I have created many smaller individual systems to give it a unique, full look.
7 - Using Fibermesh, use many single strands to create 'flyaway' hairs.
8 - When you are done creating your hairs, save out a backup file. Now combine all your hairs down into a single subtool.
You will notice that all the strands become immediately thinner, and are hardly visible in the viewport. This is because when the fibermesh subtools are combined they are converted into geometry. They have little to no thickness. Before we can use them in a render, we will have to correct this. To demonstrate how to use modeling tools to generate thickness, I will use the example of an eyelash.
____________________
PART 2 - Thickness
9 - The below picture is straight fibermesh. It has apparent thickness.
10 - And here are the lashes converted into geo (by being combined with another subtool.) Notice how thin they are.
11 - In the Zbrush tool menu, with your hair subtool selected, scroll down to the deformation submenu. In the submenu, we will give the hairs thickness by using the 'inflate' option. Very small values are needed. For these eyelashes I chose a value of .15.
12 - These are the thickened eyelashes, but we are not done yet. These lashes are uniform from the base to the tip. Real lashes (and hair) have wider roots and thinner tips.
13 - Using the inflate brush on a very low setting (1) inflate the roots of the lashes or hairs(2). Using the smooth tool, smoothing the tips of the lashes will deflate them (3). You can use the inflate brush to reduce the width of the lashes tip, but you will run the risk of negatively inflating them, so that the geo turns inside out. This is not possible using the smooth brush to reduce a hairs width.
14 - When you are done modeling, you are ready to export. Before you export, be sure to go into the tool --> polygroups option and combine the entire tool into a single polygroup. Having tools in multiple polygroups on export can cause errors when you import into other programs. There are other ways to solve this problem, this is just one solution.
15 - Export as an .OBJ
_________________________
16 - Import your geometry into Maya. Select the geometry. There are two things that we must do to all .OBJ files before we are ready to apply a material and render. The first thing is to go into the objects attributes editor (typically on the right side of the screen in Maya.) Here, we must turn on 'Visible in Reflections' and 'Visible in Refractions'.
17 - The second step for importing an .OBJ into Maya is to go into the 'NORMALS' Menu. With the OBJ selected, press 'unlock normals' (1), and then 'soften edge'(2). This will turn all the edgs of the hair (or any other geometry selected) into soft edges, rather than the hard edges that Maya imports.
18 - Your geometry should now look natural. Assign a shader to the material and you are ready to...
19 - ...render.
20 - Follow parts 2 and 3 to export the hair system from zbrush, and import it into Maya or another package. Your hair is ready to render. Here is the hair we created in part 1:
I made a little ajustment to explain my point, hope you don't mind :
Your work is really awesome, find the right lighting and it'll be stelar !
ysalex I completly agree on your choice for the lighting. Not because it's more beautyful. But it feels more real and honest as a portrait.
congrats
I'll just want to ask a technical question though. Referring to the 19. page of this thread of yours I noticed that I got some slight shading errors when applying the baked normal map for my original quad version of the mesh. I followed all the steps you adviced and I got a great normal map for the triangulated version, thanks to you. Beautifully smooth results, even though my LP head model for this normal map test was somewhat low poly.
I also want to rig and probably even animate my characters, so the quad version is always needed, yes. Luckily I can triangulate my quad version again and getting smooth results as I had with the triangulated one straight after baking. I just don't know how it will affect to the weighting of the rig. So, do you have any experience with this?
___________________
Can't share what I am working on, but did this warm-up sketch this morning. Likeness (poor likeness) and a focus on the planes of her head. No detail what-so-ever, just a base, and a texture projection at the end.
Also I have to say that I bought GMH2 for hair. What is here doesn't look great, first try at it, but it saves SO much time, so anyone needing a hair solution I absolutely suggest it. This is my first revision, took about 30 minutes to make in zbrush and get into Maya, it is absolutely dead simple and really powerful, and from here it will be much quicker to iterate on top of this, so anyways forgive me, yeah, but I really love this program.
Lighting is okay, but I might want to change it up, going to get the rest of the outfit in Maya now.
bugger... that would be amazing.
Lee, it occured to me that I read it on polycount, in the GMH2 news comments.
http://www.polycount.com/2014/02/26/geo-maya-hair-2/#comments
"...it's a pity that there isnt any use of this script for Games yet. But I am planning to somehow make it possible that to bake the hair onto the original polygon meshes 's texture ( diffuse, spec and normal channel ) . If everything goes well , I will do it in next version of GMH."
So yeah, seems like it could be tentative at best and a long way off. Too bad. Have you done any fibermesh experiments baking down to alpha cards? I keep thinking about it, im sure someone has tried.
That said I really love the new outfit's folds - the angles look more natural, and fewer folds make it look like the dress fits better.
This is just gorgeous
A test render, pose adjusted, couple other things.
I'll look through my fashion folders and see if I can find something similar to what you had. I'll PM you if I find anything. The fold work is really nice on the new one too. More marvelous experiments?
If you have anything, I'd love to see it. Thanks man I appreciate the help.
Here are some lighting and render tests, and a high-res of my favorite lighting test thus far.
Did a lot of correcting of the face, pulled the lip and jaw back, changed the shape of the under-neck, other stuff. reposed her arms and worked on the wrist joints, not sure if the pose makes 100% sense feel free to let me know.
I had tried it, but never with any success. It's probably the biggest thing missing in the hair pipeline, and if GMH2 can sort it out then they'll have probably the biggest/best niche product.
I use hair farm for generating planes in max, and it does a good job of that. It also does a good job of generating the actual hair if i want to do a full on render, but still baking from hair to planes is missing in functionality.
I feel like i should comment on the actual work here lol... It's all very good man, the cloth is very believable (even if i'm not a fan of the overall style). The skin has a kind of weirdness to it though, it pops a little too much from the overall composition, like maybe it could do with a little more subsurface to it, or a little less wrap lighting to help shade it better.
i really like the clothing style on this most recent one, altho i liked the white stripe as in a previous update. the hair im not quite feeling it, hair is extremely difficult to pull i admit, this one reads very noisy and doesnt feel like hair , maybe its the shader and the lightning and i know its wip.
Other than that no crits from me, this is looking REALLY good !!
Thanks for the crits Joao.
Quick render update (tried to rein the leg/skin in so they aren't so prominent, and a bunch of small tweeks) and an idea for a 2 piece outfit:
I love how that jacket looks. I'm diggin' the two-piece idea, but it needs something to break up the reflections a bit.
Opinions?
After for helping you out on choosing I'd say F is a solid idea with the cosmos design on the dress as it add some great contrast when viewed from afar as well as up close. But I also would like to see some logo/manufacture label that you've played about with in designs A, B and C.
Looking good pal, I think i prefer the version without the silver skirt though.
Regarding the skin of the leg and arm.
Maybe these images could help you ?
Not sure is it common but normally the innerside of the forearm is light than the one on the outer side like the image above. Maybe bcos of uv exposure for the sun.
As the legs.
All these are taken from Zbro pinterest.
http://www.pinterest.com/zbrop/
Hope this could be some help