Slow progress. I think I lost something of the likeness, but started to maybe capture a little bit of something in her eyes. We'll see I guess. I'll push it a bit further, and find better refs.
Thanks again Mr. Ace. I've commented on your likeness sculpts before, I wish I could get to that level.
Ace - forgot your questions. The eyelashes are zspheres --> adaptive skin, then copied and I used the move tool to put them in place. When I finished the details didn't read at all from any distance but close up, so I had to elongate them and thicken them. I saved the smaller thinner more realistic ones for if I ever render it.
and I should thank Afisher for pointing the artists blog out in the civil war thread. There are a ton of great matcaps on the site, plus some super inspiring artwork.
a few things that may help
- try to get a quick block in for the hair so you can better judge the forms
- her ear looks too big at the moment (only slight)
- bridge of the nose could go smoother I think
- the jaw to chin transition is emphasised slightly too much, should be flatter/smoother. Just think of the jaw bone underneath, it shouldnt bulge out for the chin, its very smooth
- you could add more subtle makeup to the polypaint, eyeliner and eye shadow mainly so it matches up better
- work on the profile view a bit more, it doesnt quite lineup yet, looks like because you dont have loads of ref you may have spent alot of time from the front
- pay attention to the head shape as what you have now is pear and shes more apple, if that makes sense !?! the emphasis on the cheeks has taken away from her heads overall proportions
- eye shape, its looking good but not perfect and its the first place you look, a few photoshop overlays should advise you where to go I think. If you nail that then the rest should be pretty easy
shes looking really good though, you are almost there, just lots of attention to detail and loads of overlaying in photoshop to make sure stuff is 1:1. Try to pull things around in lower subdivs to make life easier for yourself. subtlety is the key on good likenesses.
Does your lady know you are doing this aswell haha? mine would stab me haha
Loving the work, feel the neck needs to be improved as it's kind of thin and it's making her chin look really wide. trying to explain it, the red matches the features but not the jawline and blue matches the jawline as close as possible. I'd recommend you doing a more detailed paintover and you'll see anything else. Good work though, really liking it.
the way i do the comparison with zbrush is using the timeline to set up camera angles and photoshop, to paste in screenshots underneath the ref image and toggling on and off the ref, of course this can be misleading thanks to the nature of zbrushs wrong perspective, so from time to time it can be wise to load up the model into a real 3d tool.
Jeez, awesome paintovers by Duncn, Moot, and McKraken. Thank you guys. Thanks also Crazyfool, Neox and Snader, for the input.
A couple of things:
First, Crazyfool and now Moot: Yes, she's my wife so obviously I a.) asked her first, b.) got her permission to post and c.) I can get more references without being sneaky or weird.
About her face:
She has a pretty wide jaw and a very thin neck. Her sternomastoids from the front are decently inset from the jaw line. This is mostly a matter of perspective, since her jaw is supplimented by large cheeks.
The frontal bone on her forehead seems flatter than most people, and seems to sit behind the orbital processes, giving her forehead that flat look. It's not flat, but it seems it, and I've been having a tough time getting that.
About the pictures:
The pictures were all taken by a professional photographer, who was lurking around the edges of the event, so almost all of the images have less perspective distortion than normal. I thought this would be better, but I'm finding it hard to work in orthagonal mode in zbrush, and translate those views into perspective. I think it takes a keener eye and a more subtle hand than I possess. I'm sorting through images trying to find the ones with more perspective distortion, and I've added some to my reference file below.
Someone on g+video linked me to a wiki on how to take photos with less light information, so if I can get ahold of a nice camera I'm going to try to do that, and take better references at the same time.
Anyways, I'm having fun with it at least. I really appreciate all the feeback.
And here are more references. I have the high-res of these now too, and slowly I'm adding more angles as I go.
Dammm, I had this tabbed and I was about to say that the older model you had looked bang on apart from the material/lighting but luckily I refreshed the page before sending it or I would have looked like a fool lol
I like the new one but I think the hair could use a tiny bit of work to add some colour variation to it, but it's not that big of a deal
something that looks really strange in comparison of the flat model with the polypainted one, is the fat below the supra orbital margin . it feels like you painted this weight only with polypaint but not in actual form
First, I'm almost finalized with the pose and setup. Everything not in the zbrush document is going to be done in maya, and that's mostly the eyebrows, the eyes, and the hair strands that will fall out of the hat.
And I'm starting to comb through mental-ray and manuals, trying to figure out the Misss_fast_skin, and Misss_fast_shader2 - I think I'll be going with MISSS_FAST_SHADER2, since it's easier to control.
Here are some of my prelim experiments with both shaders. The brighter, closer one is MISS_FAST_SKIN, the others are SSS2. The hat is rendered via displacement map and maya fur. I'll have to tweek it quite a bit but I'm rather happy with the hats first tests. I can use the same system to do the opaque facial hair, I'm thinking.
Obviously the skin shader needs work. I also need to work on the skins surface in zbrush, getting the pores, wrinkles, creases etc. more realistic. I've had a heck of a time getting the maps into mental ray without losing quality. I finally figured out that the Maya 2d-file-import-node is knocking out some of the details by filtering them first, and also learned important lessons about linear color workflow.
Uhhg. Learning a lot about mental ray I guess though. I dream about it.
Crits and comments appreciated, but especially tips/tricks to using MR, SSS2, or MISS_F_SKIN, and getting nice renders out of MR. BTW, the images above are just MR standard renders. My computer can't afford to use Final gather or GI for test rendering.
Forgot, I was going to put these stitch alphas up. I realize that they might not be so great, but hopefully someone can get some use. They're the three tiling alphas I built for the hat.
The first stitch, don't know what you call it but this is how it looks:
What it looks like tiled:
And the tiling alpha to use:
________________
Here is the second stitch:
This is just a much tighter and more compact/deeper version of the first. There is more range in the alpha of black to white, to give it greater depth, and there is less empty space.
The tiling alpha:
________________
The last one, don't know what it's called but it looks like this tiled:
The SSS render is looking good. Its been a while since I used Mental Ray so I can't be that much help, but theres a good gnomon tutorial (might be a bit old, like 2 or 3yrs) called Skin Shading with Mental Ray by Alex Alvarez, and it focuses on a fast skin shader in Maya. Just looking at it now, I think you could use some more back scatter on the ears to punch out some underlining red.
And cheers for sharing the alphas, they look useful!
Still a ton to do. I hate the pore/wrinkle/etc. details of the skin, so I'll redo all that. Too much nose on her chest, and in her diffuse skin. Need to move more of that noise to the epidural layer. Work on lighting, get the eyes comped in, then redo the eyelashes and get the hat looking nice, then do the hair strands that fall out and then a bunch of other stuff.
Haven't updated in awhile. Right now I'm working on getting some life into the eyes. I think I need a bump/normal map to disrupt the perfect spheres and add some slight reflection noise. Then I need to get the subsurface veins working a little harder.
Everything else is stand-in, except the skin, which is WIP.
so cool man, but I will nit pick, as it seems your aiming for perfection :P
I think the noise on the skin below the face is too much, the wrinkles on the lips don't look right/out of place? and the lower eyelashes dont seem to line up properly.
I'm not sure if you have already said, but did you paint or use photos for the skin texture?
Dammm that looks sweet, especially the hat and eyes!
I don't know if it's just the lighting, but the skin looks dry and spongy around the shoulder area.
I noticed that in some of the ref pics you had on the previous page she had faint crease lines across her neck. I think they would help break up the neck, but I don't know if it really warrants going back a few steps.
brwnbread and Barnsey - thanks for the crits guys. I agree with everything you said. I'll have to go back to the model to redo the displacement noise on the shoulders and in parts of the face, buts I think it'll be worth it as you guys point out.
I projected the texture for the modeling phase, then polypainted my own diffuse, overall, epidermal, subdermal, and primary and secondary specular maps for the render, so everything here is painted by me.
There's a ton of stuff I want to fix, but I have to get back to looking for a job and doing realtime portfolio work.
I learned a ton doing this. This is my first true maya render, my first portrait, and I'm reasonably please with how it came out, but I'm even way more pleased about everything I learned. Hope to learn more going forward and get some more work done.
You've done a really nice job with this portrait! What really sells it for me are the smile lines, and that skin texture looks great. It feels like there is still something off with the eyes, but I can't quite figure out what. Anyway, nice work!
That looks awesome man, id say the skin shader could do with abit of tweaking, slightly higher spec power would help, but thats being uber picky (looking at earlier reference). Looking forward to seeing what u do next
Alright, time to get back into things. Did a 2 hour sketch based on the concept on the left. Not sure who the artist is, I think the image has been in my inspiration folder for some time now.
looks good, i think you've fallen back into your old ways of making noses, the nostrils on the statue are wider and more shapely. the corners of the mouth on yours also look off, yours look like the mouth sort of just continues wider, whereas on the statue, the mouth is narrower and has more if a dimple in the corners. maybe trying moving some of the mass of the corner of her mouth forward in the side view and trying to resculpt that dimple.
After the disastrous attempt at my wifes portrait I'm taking away lessons and trying to improve. This is done in Maya Vray, instead of mental ray, for comparison and learning sake. Lacks a displacement map for technical reasons.
Wow. Interesting. Her face looks great.
The hands make it feel a bit creepy, like either they're going to rip her head off or it has already been taken off and the hands are holding it.
i gotta tell you. i went back to page one and went thru all the pages and i see a HUGE improvement in anatomy, detail, texturing. its amazing. makes me wanna start one up
im graduating in 2 months and after that im in to do something like this.
Thanks guys. So the idea behind this is that half our escape team left, so we needed to come up with a way to mitigate that work. Switching from generic monsters to this (black shadow type monsters using mostly spec to show position, and careful lighting to ensure the monsters fade into the shadows) is one possible solution.
We've been seeking an FX solution, but I'm starting to think this is easier, so we'll discuss it and come up with a final idea, and then work off that. This is the escape character high-poly and the 'shadow monster' hands.
Obviously, the final scene will be low-poly, but after illness etc. I needed an excuse to work on something other than the low-poly escape characters for a day or two. I'll finish this tomorrow and then continue, and this will just a be a 'poster' of sorts, but nothing official. Just for me.
big improvements in this thread really cool to watch. loving this latest one, on some of the earlier ones Ace has it right, gotta watch your nose thickness esp in the nostril area, your shadows piece character looks great but again the nose width to nostril size seems a bit off, she has a great realistic nose width in the nostril area but the actual nostrils are tiny little guys. i mention this because it seems to be the case in the latest character as well. I would like to commend you tho on the lips and eyes on this latest one, they are fantastic.
Wow, she looks great! Eyes and mouth detail is superb.
It looks to me like her eyes might be too far apart and a bit too big. Gives her a slightly strange alien feel. Intended? Would be good to see a front view to check them.
Replies
Thanks again Mr. Ace. I've commented on your likeness sculpts before, I wish I could get to that level.
I found the shader here: http://luckilytip.blogspot.kr/2011/11/zbrush-new-custom-matcap.html
and I should thank Afisher for pointing the artists blog out in the civil war thread. There are a ton of great matcaps on the site, plus some super inspiring artwork.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=111970&page=7
Thanks again man for all your help.
This is kind of what I want to do for the hair. Please forgive the crappy photoshop job:
a few things that may help
- try to get a quick block in for the hair so you can better judge the forms
- her ear looks too big at the moment (only slight)
- bridge of the nose could go smoother I think
- the jaw to chin transition is emphasised slightly too much, should be flatter/smoother. Just think of the jaw bone underneath, it shouldnt bulge out for the chin, its very smooth
- you could add more subtle makeup to the polypaint, eyeliner and eye shadow mainly so it matches up better
- work on the profile view a bit more, it doesnt quite lineup yet, looks like because you dont have loads of ref you may have spent alot of time from the front
- pay attention to the head shape as what you have now is pear and shes more apple, if that makes sense !?! the emphasis on the cheeks has taken away from her heads overall proportions
- eye shape, its looking good but not perfect and its the first place you look, a few photoshop overlays should advise you where to go I think. If you nail that then the rest should be pretty easy
shes looking really good though, you are almost there, just lots of attention to detail and loads of overlaying in photoshop to make sure stuff is 1:1. Try to pull things around in lower subdivs to make life easier for yourself. subtlety is the key on good likenesses.
Does your lady know you are doing this aswell haha? mine would stab me haha
Also it looks like you have perspective switched off. I am not sure what others have to say on this issue but I would recommend switching it on.
3rdly I looks like there are a few small facial proportion issues. would it be possible to take an orthographic front and side shot?
Really great work I am keen to see what comes next. :thumbup:
A couple of things:
First, Crazyfool and now Moot: Yes, she's my wife so obviously I a.) asked her first, b.) got her permission to post and c.) I can get more references without being sneaky or weird.
About her face:
She has a pretty wide jaw and a very thin neck. Her sternomastoids from the front are decently inset from the jaw line. This is mostly a matter of perspective, since her jaw is supplimented by large cheeks.
The frontal bone on her forehead seems flatter than most people, and seems to sit behind the orbital processes, giving her forehead that flat look. It's not flat, but it seems it, and I've been having a tough time getting that.
About the pictures:
The pictures were all taken by a professional photographer, who was lurking around the edges of the event, so almost all of the images have less perspective distortion than normal. I thought this would be better, but I'm finding it hard to work in orthagonal mode in zbrush, and translate those views into perspective. I think it takes a keener eye and a more subtle hand than I possess. I'm sorting through images trying to find the ones with more perspective distortion, and I've added some to my reference file below.
Someone on g+video linked me to a wiki on how to take photos with less light information, so if I can get ahold of a nice camera I'm going to try to do that, and take better references at the same time.
Anyways, I'm having fun with it at least. I really appreciate all the feeback.
And here are more references. I have the high-res of these now too, and slowly I'm adding more angles as I go.
I like the new one but I think the hair could use a tiny bit of work to add some colour variation to it, but it's not that big of a deal
First, I'm almost finalized with the pose and setup. Everything not in the zbrush document is going to be done in maya, and that's mostly the eyebrows, the eyes, and the hair strands that will fall out of the hat.
And I'm starting to comb through mental-ray and manuals, trying to figure out the Misss_fast_skin, and Misss_fast_shader2 - I think I'll be going with MISSS_FAST_SHADER2, since it's easier to control.
Here are some of my prelim experiments with both shaders. The brighter, closer one is MISS_FAST_SKIN, the others are SSS2. The hat is rendered via displacement map and maya fur. I'll have to tweek it quite a bit but I'm rather happy with the hats first tests. I can use the same system to do the opaque facial hair, I'm thinking.
Obviously the skin shader needs work. I also need to work on the skins surface in zbrush, getting the pores, wrinkles, creases etc. more realistic. I've had a heck of a time getting the maps into mental ray without losing quality. I finally figured out that the Maya 2d-file-import-node is knocking out some of the details by filtering them first, and also learned important lessons about linear color workflow.
Uhhg. Learning a lot about mental ray I guess though. I dream about it.
Crits and comments appreciated, but especially tips/tricks to using MR, SSS2, or MISS_F_SKIN, and getting nice renders out of MR. BTW, the images above are just MR standard renders. My computer can't afford to use Final gather or GI for test rendering.
The first stitch, don't know what you call it but this is how it looks:
What it looks like tiled:
And the tiling alpha to use:
________________
Here is the second stitch:
This is just a much tighter and more compact/deeper version of the first. There is more range in the alpha of black to white, to give it greater depth, and there is less empty space.
The tiling alpha:
________________
The last one, don't know what it's called but it looks like this tiled:
and the tiling alpha:
And cheers for sharing the alphas, they look useful!
:poly142::poly142::poly142:
Still a ton to do. I hate the pore/wrinkle/etc. details of the skin, so I'll redo all that. Too much nose on her chest, and in her diffuse skin. Need to move more of that noise to the epidural layer. Work on lighting, get the eyes comped in, then redo the eyelashes and get the hat looking nice, then do the hair strands that fall out and then a bunch of other stuff.
Everything else is stand-in, except the skin, which is WIP.
http://i.imgur.com/vwmeQzy.jpg
I think the noise on the skin below the face is too much, the wrinkles on the lips don't look right/out of place? and the lower eyelashes dont seem to line up properly.
I'm not sure if you have already said, but did you paint or use photos for the skin texture?
I don't know if it's just the lighting, but the skin looks dry and spongy around the shoulder area.
I noticed that in some of the ref pics you had on the previous page she had faint crease lines across her neck. I think they would help break up the neck, but I don't know if it really warrants going back a few steps.
I projected the texture for the modeling phase, then polypainted my own diffuse, overall, epidermal, subdermal, and primary and secondary specular maps for the render, so everything here is painted by me.
I'm done.
There's a ton of stuff I want to fix, but I have to get back to looking for a job and doing realtime portfolio work.
I learned a ton doing this. This is my first true maya render, my first portrait, and I'm reasonably please with how it came out, but I'm even way more pleased about everything I learned. Hope to learn more going forward and get some more work done.
One more two hour sketch.
After the disastrous attempt at my wifes portrait I'm taking away lessons and trying to improve. This is done in Maya Vray, instead of mental ray, for comparison and learning sake. Lacks a displacement map for technical reasons.
The hands make it feel a bit creepy, like either they're going to rip her head off or it has already been taken off and the hands are holding it.
im graduating in 2 months and after that im in to do something like this.
thanx!!
We've been seeking an FX solution, but I'm starting to think this is easier, so we'll discuss it and come up with a final idea, and then work off that. This is the escape character high-poly and the 'shadow monster' hands.
Obviously, the final scene will be low-poly, but after illness etc. I needed an excuse to work on something other than the low-poly escape characters for a day or two. I'll finish this tomorrow and then continue, and this will just a be a 'poster' of sorts, but nothing official. Just for me.
Painted in some hair to see where I want to go.
big improvements in this thread really cool to watch. loving this latest one, on some of the earlier ones Ace has it right, gotta watch your nose thickness esp in the nostril area, your shadows piece character looks great but again the nose width to nostril size seems a bit off, she has a great realistic nose width in the nostril area but the actual nostrils are tiny little guys. i mention this because it seems to be the case in the latest character as well. I would like to commend you tho on the lips and eyes on this latest one, they are fantastic.
-Woog
It looks to me like her eyes might be too far apart and a bit too big. Gives her a slightly strange alien feel. Intended? Would be good to see a front view to check them.