This is amazing. Wow. Always a surprise with you, ysalex. Is this based off of a small set of images, a large set, or have you been doing this for so long that it has just become memory?
Thanks man. I use refs as I need them, which is just about always. This girls face doesn't have one overarching ref (i.e. its not a likeness of anyone), but references everywhere for stuff like skin and reflection etc. for specific parts, like the undereye and the smaller parts.
So I'm a little reluctant to put this here, and if someone doesn't like it feel free to let me know.
I am going to start tutorializing and making the finished parts of this available for people to download and use/learn from. So eventually the eyes, teeth&tongue, skin, and all the meshes and models. Focusing more on rendering etc. than sculpting, since there are already a ton of really good tutorials on that aspect.
So this is the first piece that is up, the eyes. Scene files, zbrush tool, meshes, textures, lighting, and tutorial on making the shaders.
Looks great, man! Soon as I get ahold of vray I'll be buying this.
As a side-note, did you see a recent work of Rafael Grassetti where he sculpted the fluid build-up in the lower eyelid? Looking at your most hair test image, I noticed that same sorta build-up (although much more subtle). What's your process towards that?
There's a couple ways I've seen of doing it, probably comes down to whatever you think is fastest or you just prefer. My personal method is to (in zbrush)mask off the area of the inner eyelid where it touches the eye, and then hitting extract. Then smoothing out the mesh, moving it into place, and then zremesher to make it a little nicer of a mesh.
When you render that thin strip of water it helps if it's a little irregular so it catches the light a little more.
The overall subtlety of her body is beautiful. And to be honest, i think her face is way more interresting now. The imperfect brow, the no-so-perfect, somewhat messy hair. I don't know if it's what you wanted, or if you like it that way, but you should keep going in that direction.
Was updating the shader to the new vray skin mtl and it crashed on me, here is where I left out. Need to rebuild a lot of what I lost but I figured out most of the controls so not a total loss.
Forgive the render errors etc, this was the only image in my render temp folder, but I kinda like the image with all the stuff on it, give it a kind new-age-aesthetics digital construction look.
Got a full time studio job as a character artist, start in 1 and 1/2 week, so got a lot to wrap up before now and then.
My only (very nitpicky) crits would be that the liquid in the inner corner of the eyes is black, as is the faint trace of it at the bottom of the middle of the eyes. It adds a dark smudge which looks a bit odd, not sure if that's how it works in real life or not though so could be wrong. Second would be the shininess of the nose, it seems just a tad strong. Could just be a personal taste thing though so take it with a pinch of salt It looks really really good so this is just me being as picky as I can be.
Hi Yuri,
Congrats on the job! Your finishing is getting stronger, it's been pretty cool to see your progress. I wanted to give you an anatomical crit real quick that may help you in the future. I think this image is better than what I could type:
Couple hours of test pose and variations, and some quick test renders. I like the one in the zbrush screencap the most, feels natural to me, but not sure yet, will do some more on it and see.
Woah, this is such good stuff. On the poses: Have you tried making her hands a bit less angled, that is, a bit more in line with the forearm or tilting the elbows back some? Just as an idea, not claiming that it will look better.
Rather technical question but do you tend to just transpose your models for posing or do you create a rig for presentation purposes?
Hey derraz, thanks, yeah she needs some tweaking, I will try to work it out a little more. No rigging, I transpose and then resculpt the anatomy to fit, since the whole morphology of the body changes when you move, even slightly, there isn't much point trying to rig it.
Here is an update to the primary composition, and then second is an alternate idea I had and threw together last night so it would render.
I dont think there is any displacement on these renders, just tests, but the other yeah, there is base displacement from my zbrush render overlayed on a procedural skin displacement, there's a bunch of alphas mixed together for different areas of the skin, which match up to masks and alphas for the spec and gloss as well.
Not that it matters since main sculpt isn't really in a good place yet, but I find it interesting - the displacement is layered with different size details, so there are for instance semi-high-frequency detail that take care of things like the pattern of skin on the back of you hand, and then there are super-high frequency details that mimic the micro-surface of the skin, I found some research data on these including images of the skin at that level I used to create normal maps.
So I did the math, and the micro-displacement at 1024 something like 200 times gives me a 204,800 pixel map as a result, so if I zoomed in on the head so the top of the head to the top of shoulders was visible, I could render out a pass where each pixel of the micro-detail was still a sub-pixel on the render (so I would still be within resolution), I could print out the result at 300DPI, and the image would be 12 feet tall.
I definitely didn't set out to do it, and that resolution is mostly useless, although it does create a nice specular effect from certain distances, but I thought it was kinda cool.
Easter renders, I like the lighting, need to work on the composition of the room, the skin texture of the girl to break up the large untextured spots on her back, and find a way to render the mirror correctly.
Maybe someone knows the answer to this. If I render the mirror at 100% glossy I get good reflections. If I render the mirror as a blend MTL with some overlayed grunge, I get the same reflections, except that all the girls reflection highlights are removed, so she doesn't get highlights etc. on her nose where she normally has a bit of specular. Any ideas?
Also any opinions on lighting and composition for either of these two? First one is very splotchy because it requires ridiculous GI sampling to remove the noise.
The 2nd render is definitely the strongest I think. The tighter cropping is framing everything in a much tighter composition and the rim lighting is giving a nice pop to the image. I would add the curtains back in behind the mirror though I think it would definitely help with viewer focus.
That's incredible. I'd also suggest adding curtains. Second one, definitely. I'm not a big fan of the hair either to be honest. It doesn't feel nearly as alive as your character. That might be the colour.
Head sketch from yesterday. Looked like a good-old golden-boy so I threw him into an astronaut sci-fi outfit that I had modeled like 2 years ago but never shared (I don't think).
Concept for the suit is by a guy whose name I dont know but I will try to find out. I didn't do it great justice anyway but it was just a mock up.
your stuff is inspiring... What drives you to keep going? I need a drive. And what do you use ti post your pictures here. They are so clear and mine come out blurry
This is pretty old by a couple weeks at least, taking the time to post it because I've been busy and will be busy in the future, so I dont know when I will get back to finishing it.
Hopefully colors and compression are okay, I was having some problems.
Replies
Really inspirational stuff.
I am going to start tutorializing and making the finished parts of this available for people to download and use/learn from. So eventually the eyes, teeth&tongue, skin, and all the meshes and models. Focusing more on rendering etc. than sculpting, since there are already a ton of really good tutorials on that aspect.
So this is the first piece that is up, the eyes. Scene files, zbrush tool, meshes, textures, lighting, and tutorial on making the shaders.
www.gumroad.com/ysalex
If anyone here grabs it, and needs some help, feel free to message or email me, I'll do my best to help out.
As a side-note, did you see a recent work of Rafael Grassetti where he sculpted the fluid build-up in the lower eyelid? Looking at your most hair test image, I noticed that same sorta build-up (although much more subtle). What's your process towards that?
https://grassetti.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/portrait_eyemodelbreakdown.jpg?w=2000&h=&crop=1
When you render that thin strip of water it helps if it's a little irregular so it catches the light a little more.
Forgive the render errors etc, this was the only image in my render temp folder, but I kinda like the image with all the stuff on it, give it a kind new-age-aesthetics digital construction look.
Got a full time studio job as a character artist, start in 1 and 1/2 week, so got a lot to wrap up before now and then.
Here is the overnight render with hair. Hair needs some work, didn't expect to get this close to it.
Congrats on the job! Your finishing is getting stronger, it's been pretty cool to see your progress. I wanted to give you an anatomical crit real quick that may help you in the future. I think this image is better than what I could type:
Rather technical question but do you tend to just transpose your models for posing or do you create a rig for presentation purposes?
Here is an update to the primary composition, and then second is an alternate idea I had and threw together last night so it would render.
Is most of the microsurface detail (pores, uneven skin, etc) through a bump/normal map on the final render?
Not that it matters since main sculpt isn't really in a good place yet, but I find it interesting - the displacement is layered with different size details, so there are for instance semi-high-frequency detail that take care of things like the pattern of skin on the back of you hand, and then there are super-high frequency details that mimic the micro-surface of the skin, I found some research data on these including images of the skin at that level I used to create normal maps.
So I did the math, and the micro-displacement at 1024 something like 200 times gives me a 204,800 pixel map as a result, so if I zoomed in on the head so the top of the head to the top of shoulders was visible, I could render out a pass where each pixel of the micro-detail was still a sub-pixel on the render (so I would still be within resolution), I could print out the result at 300DPI, and the image would be 12 feet tall.
I definitely didn't set out to do it, and that resolution is mostly useless, although it does create a nice specular effect from certain distances, but I thought it was kinda cool.
Maybe someone knows the answer to this. If I render the mirror at 100% glossy I get good reflections. If I render the mirror as a blend MTL with some overlayed grunge, I get the same reflections, except that all the girls reflection highlights are removed, so she doesn't get highlights etc. on her nose where she normally has a bit of specular. Any ideas?
Also any opinions on lighting and composition for either of these two? First one is very splotchy because it requires ridiculous GI sampling to remove the noise.
I made a quick paintover...hope you don't mind :poly122: Just played with exposure and saturation. ALSO added a bit of Johnny with some rubbish DOF.
Keep up the rad work. she is looking awesome. I am keen to see where you go with her.
ohh and adding the curtains to the background could look pretty cool too.
desaturated my paintover by about 25 and removed just a bit of the redness....THIS is more like I was thinking. Sorry :poly142:
I am keen to see more she looks great.
Concept for the suit is by a guy whose name I dont know but I will try to find out. I didn't do it great justice anyway but it was just a mock up.
Hopefully colors and compression are okay, I was having some problems.
Here is full size: http://postimg.org/image/c1trh0m2l/full/