So I pulled this out last night and sunk some more time into it. Does this pose strike others as more natural than the previous one? Believable at all? I feel like if I can find a pose that works the movement I'm trying to get, that I would be a lot happier moving forward with this. I like the one with the girl free-standing, but I'm not a fan of how she's so flat-footed and how ... something, I don't know, boring maybe, that the pose looks. The only other option are sitting, which I might try, and this - leaning on something. Only the last version of her leaning I didn't really feel looked good or like something someone would do.
Anyways, that's a long rambling paragraph. Opinions appreciated.
I mean, most of my forward movement has been done over the course of this thread. So it's been a couple of years now I believe. I have a couple of anatomy books but my favorite one is 'artistic anatomy' by Dr. Paul Richer, but I've seen lists of anatomy books on this site (general discussion threads I believe) whose books probably have better merit.
Edit: I just realized this thread is only one a half years old. I guess I am mis-remembering my timeline.
Still, most of my forward momentum is here, but there were probably a good couple years before that. Apparently my first polycount post was just over 2 years ago. I thought I'd been here a lot longer than that. A quick lookup reveals that I was posting on gamedev.net in the art section back in 2009, but I don't believe I really realized that I wanted to do game art, or characters until I started posting at polycount in fall 2011. (I had been posting at gamedev.net because I thought I wanted to be a game writer, I was just learning to do art so a team there would let me also contribute to writing).
Nuts. I didn't really forget all this, but I haven't thought about it in quite awhile. or maybe I just was just blocking it.
Gotta get these heads down-pat. Been working on a female and I just can't get the proportions right, hence anatomy studies. It's an all-around good idea.
Nice thread, by the way. Lots of useful tips from a variety of Polycounters.
I realized I didn't answer your question very well. When you ask 'where to start', I would say technically, proportions and mass. But honestly I'm not the best person to ask, there's a ton of other people here who could give much better and in-depth answers than that, and seeking those people out would probably do you better.
One thing I've definitely learned though is that making it a habit is the real place to start. It's just super repetitive. I don't have the best habits, I get side-tracked on rendering and other projects, I get bogged down in superfluous stuff, but I do seem at least to have gotten in a rhythm of working every day, quite a lot, and maybe that brute force more than anything has been good for me. So that's where I'd say start.
Other than that, MM brought up a few pages back that the quickest way is to focus and do nothing but anatomy, and suggested doing specific body parts etc. That might be a good way to go. I know I feel I need to get in the habit of that more.
Oh man ysalex you are killing this and your progress from the reporter girl has just been outstanding and a real inspiration.
As for your latest post it's great but I think the black background totally cancels out her hair. Maybe by having a light source from a certain angle could possibly highlight the hair.
After going through your whole gallery, I am really impressed! I was wondering if it would be possible for you to make a hair tutorial? I would love to see the way you make your hair!
Man this thread is a huge inspiration, I love seeing all the progress you make, I think it makes us all push harder, great stuff man love the new model simple but beautiful. I think the head looks ok but kinda hard to tell with the model being in its current pose.
Honestly I'm not the person to ask about realtime hair. This latest haircut on the woman model turned out alright, but that is my first honest attempt to doing proper realtime hair. I've either avoided it, or it hasn't been super necessary until now, but I have very little experience with it.
Here's the 99% done model. I think I might do one or two lighting touch-ups, but I don't believe that I'll be changing much from here since with all the extra hair bits it's starting to get up there in render time, this was about 1.5 hours.
Beautiful. Lower legs and feet need a bit more attention and maybe warm up the sss a bit more. Keep it up, you obviously are working very hard at this. Wished I made this:)
Hi Ysalex, fantastic work, great anatomy and pose.
I don't know if you plan on keeping this lighting and scene setup, but i know that you could add something more, there is a little bit more work to do on the lighting and composition of your image. I've made a paintover and a comparison image so you understand what i mean.
The way your shading and lighting is done brings the eye to focus on the ground. The reflexions are way too high and too bright, the ones you had before were way better imo. You can easily bring back the focus to the face and upper body with a little touch up. IMO it doesn't read well since it force you to look at the image from bottom to top.
What i would try to achieve is reduce the brightness of the ground and add a little more to the face. You would need some rimlight on your hair too, to detach the dark brown hairs from the dark black background.
This is my two cents, you can choose to do whatever you want with the little critic, but i think it might add a little more to your work. Everybody has its own vision of things.
And you should not worry about the 1.5h render time. It's really not that much, and since it's a still image, doesn't really matter. You should focus on the result. If you were to do some animation with this, it would be different.
I can't offer much help on the rendering front, but I did a quick edit of the face... for some reason the anatomy was buggin me. This is probably just personal preference, and the face you've sculpted could be a real face, but I wanted to see what it looked like with different proportions. I shrank most of the features a little and adjusted the eyebrows... enjoy
Like mentioned above the feet need more attention; the right foot looks ok to me, the left foot and its shadow that looks off, but other than that, awesome job man!
Great stuff man, keep on pouring the images in, I've got some inspiration from you. Ferg's idea seem to be right, and I'd also darken the ground, but add a puddle underneath the hair to make sure she's squeezing the water out of her hair. Brilliant job anyway!
Ferg - thanks for the paintover. I like some of the edits you suggested. I did make some changes, but they were mostly to the mouth (I believe) and nose, although they might not be so visible.
Felixenfeu - I totally get why you don't like the reflections, and I generally think that most people agree with you. I made some changes to the floor, but I didn't drop the reflectivity much. The floor acts like a large bounce light, illuminating the underside and giving some nice softer shadows. For drama, I would prefer just the top-light like you prefered, but for showing off the anatomy I needed something more in the scene. I could lower the floor spec and multiply the GI, but that would break the lighting a bit and I didn't really like the tradeoff. The other thing I could do would be drop a soft area light underneath her, just over the floor, so it wouldn't case a shine on the floor and yet still illuminate her body, but having a light so close between her and the ground that you can't see wouldn't make much sense in any realistic way. In the end, I darkened the ground diffuse and tried to get more out of my rim lights (2 rim lights), but I needed to retain most if not all of the ground reflections.
Also, about the 1.5 hour render time, I'm actually fairly proud of keeping it so low even with so many hairs and a low noise threshold, but it does kill my ability to do test renders. Relying on GI means I have to keep it on for test renders, so just testing a smaller part of the scene takes 20 min or more. That's the real time sink, since making 20 changes and testing them is a combined render time of 6.5 hours. (of course I make more than 1 change at a time, but I also did way way more than 20 test renders.)
ENODMI - thank you, that means a lot. I did what I could with the foot and some of the straight leg.
Thanks for the explanations. Even though you didn't dropped the reflexion much, it's still way better that way. It was clearly too high. And good thing you moved the stool too, way better visibility of the feet/legs.
Anyway, when poeple argue on details, it usually means you've did a good job already. Great piece of art.
Anyone mind lending me a hand with child size proprtions? Everything I've read, images I've seen, etc, says that they should be 5 heads high (for a 3 year old), but she feels like she has a freakish head.
i think that's it. also, there's maybe too much colour going on? like i understand you want rosy cheeks in there, but it looks like she's wearing makeup, which makes it freakish.
kids are tough to get right man. but you'll get it!
Hey man, I would definitely tone down on that make up like gir mentioned. That'll instantly give her a more childish face. Also.. something is off with the eyelashes - probably too long. I would definitely shorten them a bit as they currently look like fake lashes. Adding baby fat to the cheeks isn't really necessary because doing so will take 1 year off of her (by the time they hit 3, a lot of the fat is gone):
I myself am working on a child, they sure are a challenge to create!
Figuring it out, not 100% but better. She's now supposed to be around 7-9. Kept some baby fat in her cheeks, but pulled back on the other features. Minor adjustments to her eyes, nose cartiledge and size, and some other minor stuff. Thanks for the input Lee and Viktor, good suggestions, made a difference. Viktor, is there a WIP thread for your kid?
Nice!!
Can you post the ref you're using. This is def a challenge, its looking like a child but still seems kinda adult-ish.
Without seeing the ref, my crit is: most kid's faces appear small because their foreheads are large. Their eyebrows tend to be more straight or a small curve.
Looking at it again, I think the forehead size is fine, maybe just lessen the curve to the brows.
I could be wrong but have you could tried raising the top of the skull a bit. When I google cancer kids (best way to see them bald) the heads seem to have a bit more going on at the top.
For me the eyes aren't working yet, it's a mixture between the over arching eye brows and the bulge on the outer brow I think. The eyes are always what make and break them, especially with children. That overlap is extremely rare in children and is usually fat deposits that develop later in life. Maybe just smooth it out and try for some straighter eye brows.
Your anatomy work is killer though dude, love the last piece, I need to learn v ray haha
Nice an clean as always
The kids looks really great, I would have only one suggestion about the tip of the nose that could be more round to fit the age and ethnicity of the child. The reference Leopold posted show it quite well, the nose is really round. Also maybe the nasal bone is to defined, but I'm really not sure about this last point.
Anyway feel free to ignore, very solid work as always man.
Finished the low-poly for the kid, but I want to clean up some stuff in the model and texture before I post it.
This weekend is taken up by a wedding and all the festivities associated, so the most I could get done was playing with concepting something different out during visits to the house.
I am not a good concepter (word?), I guess the word would be designer. I need more work playing with shapes and systems, so I want to do a long term WIP in the few hours I keep to my own advancement a week.
Right now I'm blatantly re-using old meshes and pieces, and everything else is super quick and dirty. Mostly I'm concentrating on the overall shape and dynamics.
Theme is more blade-runner or elysium than space-punk or mass-effect, if that makes any sense.
Was given some concept art for a freelance project that I am very much looking forward to working on for a load of creative and technical reasons, plus they are giving me a bunch of time so I can really burrow into it and be my detail oriented self, which is a first for me freelance wise - everybody else seems to need everything yesterday.
For now I'm just feeling out the concept. This was like a warm-up sketch, about 2 hours from a previous model. I look forward to grabbing some time and really doing the awesome concept art some justice, and when I get closer I will post the concept as well.
Man some sweet stuff going on Ysalex that kid and specially the black chick are looking great i cant wait to see where you go with her damn i am feeling bad about my stuff now xD those wrinkles in her pants are really nice as well, keep up the great work man
Thanks Azkur, I was just in your thread thinking I wish I had your hardsurface/organic skills, looking at that robot it's similar to what I want to do with the girl.
I love the hair on this guy, as simple as it is. And is his right eye socket a little lower? Can't tell if my mind's playing tricks on me but good job if so - a friend of mine had his zygomatic broken while boxing and his left eye socket's very slightly lower. Supposedly a tell tale sign of people who have a few fights/brawls under their belt.
Thanks Azkur, I was just in your thread thinking I wish I had your hardsurface/organic skills, looking at that robot it's similar to what I want to do with the girl.
ahah i guess the grass is always greener but thanks for the compliment, i think that in general we tend to over analyze our work a lot more than we do other and just look for the flaws xD i wouldn't worry your chick is looking great and i have no doubts you will get some bad ass hard surface stuff in there
Totally agree Azkur. Lord Sebbington, I did work on making those eyelids asymmetrical by just a bit, so the eye socket thing was unintentional, but I'm going to try it out on purpose next time I go back at this guy, so thanks for the suggestion.
Finished the younger girl. Some serious time constraints (2 weeks to final mesh for the riggers and animators, 1 week allowed for touch-ups after that point). I'm very happy with her though, my first shot at a kid (she's supposed to be 9), and sticking to a decent texture and poly budget.
also, personally, i would have toned down the fresnel on the skin a tad, blows out a bit compared to the rest of the values on the 2 first shots of her.
Replies
Anyways, that's a long rambling paragraph. Opinions appreciated.
I purchased a copy of Eliot Goldfinger's Anatomy for Artists book, as many sites suggested that it was one of the best. Any tips?
Edit: I just realized this thread is only one a half years old. I guess I am mis-remembering my timeline.
Still, most of my forward momentum is here, but there were probably a good couple years before that. Apparently my first polycount post was just over 2 years ago. I thought I'd been here a lot longer than that. A quick lookup reveals that I was posting on gamedev.net in the art section back in 2009, but I don't believe I really realized that I wanted to do game art, or characters until I started posting at polycount in fall 2011. (I had been posting at gamedev.net because I thought I wanted to be a game writer, I was just learning to do art so a team there would let me also contribute to writing).
Nuts. I didn't really forget all this, but I haven't thought about it in quite awhile. or maybe I just was just blocking it.
No wonder. Anatomy is a strain.
Gotta get these heads down-pat. Been working on a female and I just can't get the proportions right, hence anatomy studies. It's an all-around good idea.
Nice thread, by the way. Lots of useful tips from a variety of Polycounters.
One thing I've definitely learned though is that making it a habit is the real place to start. It's just super repetitive. I don't have the best habits, I get side-tracked on rendering and other projects, I get bogged down in superfluous stuff, but I do seem at least to have gotten in a rhythm of working every day, quite a lot, and maybe that brute force more than anything has been good for me. So that's where I'd say start.
Other than that, MM brought up a few pages back that the quickest way is to focus and do nothing but anatomy, and suggested doing specific body parts etc. That might be a good way to go. I know I feel I need to get in the habit of that more.
As for your latest post it's great but I think the black background totally cancels out her hair. Maybe by having a light source from a certain angle could possibly highlight the hair.
Realtime if possible!
Here's the 99% done model. I think I might do one or two lighting touch-ups, but I don't believe that I'll be changing much from here since with all the extra hair bits it's starting to get up there in render time, this was about 1.5 hours.
I don't know if you plan on keeping this lighting and scene setup, but i know that you could add something more, there is a little bit more work to do on the lighting and composition of your image. I've made a paintover and a comparison image so you understand what i mean.
The way your shading and lighting is done brings the eye to focus on the ground. The reflexions are way too high and too bright, the ones you had before were way better imo. You can easily bring back the focus to the face and upper body with a little touch up. IMO it doesn't read well since it force you to look at the image from bottom to top.
What i would try to achieve is reduce the brightness of the ground and add a little more to the face. You would need some rimlight on your hair too, to detach the dark brown hairs from the dark black background.
This is my two cents, you can choose to do whatever you want with the little critic, but i think it might add a little more to your work. Everybody has its own vision of things.
And you should not worry about the 1.5h render time. It's really not that much, and since it's a still image, doesn't really matter. You should focus on the result. If you were to do some animation with this, it would be different.
I can't offer much help on the rendering front, but I did a quick edit of the face... for some reason the anatomy was buggin me. This is probably just personal preference, and the face you've sculpted could be a real face, but I wanted to see what it looked like with different proportions. I shrank most of the features a little and adjusted the eyebrows... enjoy
Like mentioned above the feet need more attention; the right foot looks ok to me, the left foot and its shadow that looks off, but other than that, awesome job man!
This is my final final, need to move on.
Ferg - thanks for the paintover. I like some of the edits you suggested. I did make some changes, but they were mostly to the mouth (I believe) and nose, although they might not be so visible.
Felixenfeu - I totally get why you don't like the reflections, and I generally think that most people agree with you. I made some changes to the floor, but I didn't drop the reflectivity much. The floor acts like a large bounce light, illuminating the underside and giving some nice softer shadows. For drama, I would prefer just the top-light like you prefered, but for showing off the anatomy I needed something more in the scene. I could lower the floor spec and multiply the GI, but that would break the lighting a bit and I didn't really like the tradeoff. The other thing I could do would be drop a soft area light underneath her, just over the floor, so it wouldn't case a shine on the floor and yet still illuminate her body, but having a light so close between her and the ground that you can't see wouldn't make much sense in any realistic way. In the end, I darkened the ground diffuse and tried to get more out of my rim lights (2 rim lights), but I needed to retain most if not all of the ground reflections.
Also, about the 1.5 hour render time, I'm actually fairly proud of keeping it so low even with so many hairs and a low noise threshold, but it does kill my ability to do test renders. Relying on GI means I have to keep it on for test renders, so just testing a smaller part of the scene takes 20 min or more. That's the real time sink, since making 20 changes and testing them is a combined render time of 6.5 hours. (of course I make more than 1 change at a time, but I also did way way more than 20 test renders.)
ENODMI - thank you, that means a lot. I did what I could with the foot and some of the straight leg.
Anyway, when poeple argue on details, it usually means you've did a good job already. Great piece of art.
Advice/input appreciated.
fact.
kids are tough to get right man. but you'll get it!
I myself am working on a child, they sure are a challenge to create!
...very inspirational!
Can you post the ref you're using. This is def a challenge, its looking like a child but still seems kinda adult-ish.
Without seeing the ref, my crit is: most kid's faces appear small because their foreheads are large. Their eyebrows tend to be more straight or a small curve.
Looking at it again, I think the forehead size is fine, maybe just lessen the curve to the brows.
Looking forward to more :thumbup::thumbup:
Your anatomy work is killer though dude, love the last piece, I need to learn v ray haha
^^^ this and kids are weird looking! :poly142:
The kids looks really great, I would have only one suggestion about the tip of the nose that could be more round to fit the age and ethnicity of the child. The reference Leopold posted show it quite well, the nose is really round. Also maybe the nasal bone is to defined, but I'm really not sure about this last point.
Anyway feel free to ignore, very solid work as always man.
This weekend is taken up by a wedding and all the festivities associated, so the most I could get done was playing with concepting something different out during visits to the house.
I am not a good concepter (word?), I guess the word would be designer. I need more work playing with shapes and systems, so I want to do a long term WIP in the few hours I keep to my own advancement a week.
Right now I'm blatantly re-using old meshes and pieces, and everything else is super quick and dirty. Mostly I'm concentrating on the overall shape and dynamics.
Theme is more blade-runner or elysium than space-punk or mass-effect, if that makes any sense.
For now I'm just feeling out the concept. This was like a warm-up sketch, about 2 hours from a previous model. I look forward to grabbing some time and really doing the awesome concept art some justice, and when I get closer I will post the concept as well.
I love the hair on this guy, as simple as it is. And is his right eye socket a little lower? Can't tell if my mind's playing tricks on me but good job if so - a friend of mine had his zygomatic broken while boxing and his left eye socket's very slightly lower. Supposedly a tell tale sign of people who have a few fights/brawls under their belt.
ahah i guess the grass is always greener
Finished the younger girl. Some serious time constraints (2 weeks to final mesh for the riggers and animators, 1 week allowed for touch-ups after that point). I'm very happy with her though, my first shot at a kid (she's supposed to be 9), and sticking to a decent texture and poly budget.
whats your budget?
also, personally, i would have toned down the fresnel on the skin a tad, blows out a bit compared to the rest of the values on the 2 first shots of her.