Yarrr, this is definitely one thread to remember Thanks for sharing the tips, bits and advices about what's going on through your mind while you're working.As of today, not many people care (or want) to share their knowledge and how-to, and it's definitely a pleasure to read walls of text as your going through your working, telling us not only about the technical stuff, but also the artistic and the thought-process.
Already said it, but thanks, that's definitely something awesome to share !
PS: I knew the jiggywiggy about the 2D, but omfg, what improvement ! You startled my love for 2D and brightened my spark anew Thanks for the sites, they are awesome, definitely gonna work everyday
Great choice of character! I think anime scale figures go pretty underappreciated as far as art goes - capturing those clean forms in 3d and getting the feel of the character from a 2d drawing that doesn't have any of the restrictions of 3d, is extremely difficult.
Agree about the West not being great at making elegant and feminine characters, something to do with comic book reference/different beauty standards maybe?
So looking forward to seeing you make this character haha. The face on your Chun-li came really close to this aesthetic I think :] Are you planning to recreate the pose/expression of the World is Mine figure or do something different? Getting some hair animations on there would be awesome 8D
I don't think I'm going to close this tab, and just refresh the page a few times every day. I don't want to miss a thing here, all very good information.
This is so amazing, Im going to be working on a female character over the next month or two, and I think (if Its alright with you) I'll be sort of "auditing" the class by following alongsince everythings being posted publicly.
I'll make sure not to make people think Im actually in the class for realz
Funny, but my next big project over next 2 months i have also planned to be a female. I will have a detailed WIP up soon.
And I was very suprized to see this and thought about what a great coincidence this is!
So far I love what I see, great job!
Really impressed by you Hazardous, the other guys too, I'm glad I found the initial topic where you started this. It's so much fun to see what you guys do.
Thanks man for your tips, I will follow this post at every step. If you are a great artist now I don't know what you will do after all this learning path u are doing.
Fantastic update man! This is what I wait for every week now. I have also found that practicing my 2d helps with my 3d. It's surprising how much 2d knowledge/skill transfers to your 3d. Watching all of these "Course Character" posts makes me really want to do work! Thanks for sharing. xD
Thanks everyone it's crazy and super encouraging to see / get all the support
Future Fiction: I will do my best to match the world is mine figurine, but weel see how I go - the hair will be brutal, something I would probably create only for this one single position like the figurine.
Base mesh
I've been asked a fair few times about base meshes, and some tips for creating them. To be blunt, I've never been a stickler for having a really nice base mesh - The last time I built one was about 3 years ago. And have been using it ever since - for guys and girls HAH!
I never really considered them as 'one of those things that you have to have exactly right' and I still dont really believe they are THAT important to your final sculpt, so I wouldnt be too worried about having an awesome one tbh.
For this course though, I decided to build a new one, and try out a few things along the way.
With tools like dynamesh / zspheres etc - a base mesh can be created fairly quickly and simply using these tools no matter what your creating... a 10 tentacled beast to a one legged, one armed zombie. I won't be going into how to use these tools, there are plenty of tuts out there that can help with that. (For the final PDF version of this course I will link some good ones)
Firstly, for a blockin I started with a sphere, and pushed / pulled it around using dynamesh, masking and the move brush. It was my first time using dynamesh in such a manner and tbh I found it pretty quick for doing this.
I used multiple spheres and cylinders for the creation of limbs purely for my own exploration, but you could probably get away with just pulling everything out from one single sphere if you desired.
I especially liked the fact that when you combine ztools into one, and hit dynamesh it cleans up all the interesections just like I wanted, ahhh how far we have come from the boolean modifier (:poly127:) in the early Max days!
Just like when I was painting in 2d, now in 3d I use the 'image plane' tool in zbrush to load in my ortho's just to give a quick reference on whether I was creating something way out of propotion or not.
Always use reference or have it handy!
At this point I'm only looking for a 'shape' so I'm not concerned if its ugly and not looking 'cool' yet. Also dont worry if dynamesh creates some fugly topology we wont be using that junk either.
Once I had the blob done, I exported that shape out to 3dcoat and used the retopo tools to create something with friendly topology for sculpting on! Again I wont be going into how to use 3dcoat, there are so many tuts on youtube available.
Lastly when I've retopo'd everything out to satisfaction I will typically make some final proporion tweaks and adjustments according to my reference ortho's flicking back and forth between zbrush and Max using GoZ.
If you arent using GoZ yet. -5 Points for you :poly127:
NOTE: At this point, I am by no means 'locked in' with regards to proportions etc but its quite possible to do so depending on how much time and effort you invest into the base mesh at this early stage. This can be helpful in a production situation if you need riggers to get started prototyping rigs etc while you progress on your sculpt.
Just be sure to have a nice healthy relationship with them, and that they understand that changes may need to be made, so if/when those changes do arrive they dont want to punch you in the throat and do other things of a less than savory nature.
One thing worth mentioning here is the density distribution for your base mesh. I like to have extra density on the torso, around her bum, breasts and in a few places on the face for obvious reasons.
There are a few tri's and funky bits - I could invest a whole bunch more time cleaning this up more but I havent had any trouble yet and I dont forcast any problems.
Now that I've got my base mesh ready to go, I will start breaking her up into polygroups. This is something I'm in the habit of adjusting and working on as I progress on the model but generally I will always have a group for the arms, so I can hide them and examine the torso alone. This is really good for working the ribcage and getting those nice sexy back curves.
I'll also break up the head and torso. For the Head I break it up into Nose, Eyes, Upper and Lower Lip - this is mainly so I can focus on one area at a time when working on the face. I tend to do this is a circular fashion which ill go into more in the next episode, but basically I'll isolate just one area, and work on it for 5 or 10 min, then move to the next piece and so on, and keep moving around the face slowly bringing it all together.
One last thing to point out, I think its a good idea for everything to be in a fairly neutral position. Like the arms hands, spine arch, shoulders / clavicals, legs / knees and even mouth.
Putting a heap of character into a base mesh is probably only going to be more useful for that one off sculpt you have in mind, and not really effective as a 'base mesh' that you could call upon many times.
*Start Rage*Too many times, in projects that have required me to build characters in a STIFF T-POSE I've had to rely and entrust animators to lower the clavicles and make nice sweaping shoulder silhouettes after I'm done. It almost never looks as good as if it was crafted by an artist. Sorry guys.
If you ever see a game where characters have boxy and square shoulders - you can almost BET the models were built in a straight TPose and someone forgot to lower clavicles / make ammends later on.*End Rage*
Thats basically it for the base mesh section - again I dont think its really the be all and end all for sculpting - you can use so many things these days as a base and still end up with great results.
Experiment & have fun with smooshing things around at this early stage when you still can and definitely dont worry too much about tiny things - youll nail these later on!!
I'm particularly interested in seeing how you tackle the eyes: I've seen people use spheres some times, but for the "manga look" they often take away a bit from the original shape of the eyes... Some people use just textures as I understand it, on a surface (I'm a complete noob, so I apologise if I surmised something completely off) and in one case I saw a model in which the sclera was actually a concave white surface with the disc of the eye in front - I didn't notice it at all in the renders of this model (which coincidentally was another Miku model), but I purchased it to study it, and saw it in the program I loaded it in.
Thanks so much for taking the time to share this, it's really helpful!
I'm very courius how you will approach her face. Will it be your usual semi realistic style. Or it will be stay closer to her animesque style (no nostril etc).
I personaly prefer the latter =P
Anyway.. overall body porportion looks spot on, bottom an boobs at right size XD
Ok, you talked me into it. I never could draw which is why I love 3d so much. My mom is a helluvan artist and I grew up around painting and sculpting. Hell she even has her own kiln.
I have a shit-ton of respect for you for doing this very important thread. :cheers:
Awesome thread Thanks again for sharing all of the details, it helps a lot. I also started drawing and .. I have a long way to go, but it is a start
Looking forward to see her more detailed
Subscribing like the fist of the north star!! Making ladies is a weakpoint of mine, and there's nobody better to learn from.
Interesting to see your post on learning 2d. I kind of came at it from the opposite side. I used to be big into drawing, and there's a lot of stuff that never really clicked with me until I started sculpting. I feel like one isn't really more important than the other, you just have to do both to get the whole picture.
Hey Guys thanks again for the support, the Pm's and the IM's its all super awesome and does make one feel good !!
Miku's Head - Part Uno.
So I'm going to break the head part of this course into 2 sections because I think its important for me to outline something here about the way I work.
I like to firstly flesh things out, get them to a point where I can see providence and potential in the direction im heading before I move on to another area and try to push it to that same happy place. I can usually see a lot of errors and problems at this point, but the main thing is, Im comfortable knowing that I know what needs to be fixed, and that I can see (without too much trouble) that I will be able to push it there later.
Once I get other parts of the character to this stage I will typically jump around these parts and continue to do so until the whole character is pushed through to the best representation of my current capabilities.
So firstly the difficulty with tackling an anime looking character is that the forms are all super simple, landmark realistic shapes and guides are often barely there or in some cases removed alltogether, face proportions are often extremely different to what you might be used to.
But wait, without all this realistic babble to worry about this should be easier then right ? Wrong.
Without these landmarks that I was so used to finding quickly in my sculpts (and in fact anything I have done previous) I almost instantly found myself lost. I was sculpting away in no-mans land, hoping to magically stumble across something that I could grasp on to. This was a humbling experience - I totally recomend everyone try and sculpt an anime face one day, even if its not your thing, it made me acutely aware of just how little I really know about forms & character art, and how much I have to go.
I had to find SOMETHING to grasp on to, so I turned back to a reference gathering session - something I could directly reference while working, I needed to abolish my instinctive habits and learn new ones. So I made this page of anime style figurine heads:
The things that troubled me the most were:
The profile of the head.
The jawline.
The shape of the cheeks and how they run down to a tiny pointed chin.
The eyes.
Making all the inbetween areas of the problematic areas listed above smooth rounded forms.
What have I got myself into!!!!
After some study, some intense sculpting, and some more reference gathering. I finaly found something I could grasp on to.
The silly thing was, I felt like I should have been able to see this from the start!
I should trust in what I like to call 'feminine lines' they never lead me astray!! They are everywhere, all over a female face and body. They are contour lines that play together and create pleasing shapes. Here's the one that I found, and despite proportions being so crazy on miku, I found these lines and suddenly things started to click.
I made the decision to not go for the traditional eyeball in the socket I want to really change the eye up and give her a range of expressions at the end so, I'll be painting in different eyes for that as opposed to morphing something into shape.
Once I had pushed the face to a happy place - I felt okay to start blocking in the hair. This was a fairly simply affair for all the hair around her head. I made up my mind that I would model all that stuff into the low without alphas. So I used Dynamesh and zspheres for all of that part.
The only brushes I use are ClayBuildUp, Move, Smooth & Polish.
Here's where she is at now:
For the crazy ponytails, I'll probably write a whole section just on that
As always I like to polypaint stuff into the face as soon as I get it to that happy place I mentioned above. This is to get a feel for how things are going / might look towards the end. It always helps to get all the features on a female face there and to some degree colored, because it always tends to brings out potential faults and errors in forms and make clearer areas that might need a bit more work.
Actually a funny story about the image above. I was looking at a totally different Miku figurine as reference while I was painting these eyes - so they are definitely not the right ones and totally out of whack - look at those eyebrows......whoops!
next.........blocking in the rest of Miku's outfit!
So you're just running with the stenciled on eyes? I guess that makes sense given how graphical the character design is, but given you seem to be really trying to push you skills here, it might be an interesting challenge to do them in 3d.
thanks for the "human" comments about your thoughts as you go. So often it seems like we see the end result and assume that the artist just sat down and busted out some amazing art with ease and moved on. We don't get to see or read the struggle and mistakes and learning the artist goes through to end up with the image they posted.
looks cool so far! i feel the way funky is handling the eyes for dizzy (anime influenced) would work better imo. they're still big and carry the same shape you want. but if your trying to replicate what you see exactly then forget what i said, but if not then do a reinterpreted version?
looks cool so far! i feel the way funky is handling the eyes for dizzy (anime influenced) would work better imo. they're still big and carry the same shape you want. but if your trying to replicate what you see exactly then forget what i said, but if not then do a reinterpret version?
but awesome progress dude!
Yeah, I agree with this. From an animator's point of view this isn't a very good thing, the eyes are one of the most essential parts of the face and if they look dead it's gonna affect the whole character. I'm sure it will work in screenshots though but it seems like a waste considering it's a current-gen character.
I love the progress however. Very detailed post and a great render.
Just discovered this thread on polycount's twitter and wowzers, sooooo awesome! I love Miku's design and it's gonna be really awesome to see the process of this and how this turns out. I'm pretty sure it's gonna look good Hazardous! Thank you for the documentation you're providing all of us with this.
And I totally shook my head up and down when you were talking about how 2D can help your 3D. Just this year I started to form the habit of drawing the human figure. I do environments but I think it's good to just draw, free up your hand and get at it and eventually I will move into drawing objects and what not. But it really is interesting and a lot of fun to consistently figure out the human figure and what not. I feel that regardless it will help me in my 3D when it comes to forms, silhoutte and all.
Amazing read and very useful tips and thoughts. The 2d part was very interesting. It's nice to see your progress in 2d as well as in 3d, same for the breakdown including difficulties. Not only is it awesome looking but it really gives me a huge wish to learn more and improve drastically my own work.
Thanks a lot for these, looking forward to the next chapters.:)
Although the chin may be a bit too tall, and I can't help but think there's something off with the jawline. Could you post a shot of her head without the hair?
Hey guys thanks so much again for all the nice comments!
Jackablade, Striker, Saman: Okay okay! You guys convinced me, after talking a bit with the awesome Andy Hickenbottom I'm going to take a shot at a 3d eye. It's definitely not going to be the traditional spherical 'eyeball in a socket' approach though - but more of a combination of planar and not so planar shapes that can be morphed and have shader effects applied. I need to be able to fit a full range of anime like expressions here from a suspicious look with tiny squinty barely open and deformed pupils right the way through to giant teary eyed saucers - yet retain that 2d / anime feel about them.
Marshal Banana: Sure man when I finish my high I'll post up some shots without hair
YoutLeaderVal: Take a look here for some really good advice!
So I actually took a slight detour and did something I wouldn't normally do but thought what the hell, I'll add this up here anyway.
I went ahead and did a transpose of my high poly model to see if I could make a nice representation of my reference and set myself a bit of a target to hit.
I still need to repaint her eyes for this, add more hair strands and resculpt the cloth to suit this pose, as well as cleanup the bends in the limbs, fingers and quite a few other things! - but this is good enough for now, its at that happy place I mentioned in my last post. I will definitely come back and polish this up once I've finished with the making a realtime version of her at the end of this course.
I decided to add this detour / exploration here because I wanted to share a few of the things I ran into during this process.
I used transpose master in zbrush to pose Miku, and for those that dont know or havent used it, it essentially creates a low poly cage for you to pose with, it then translates your original high poly mesh to the new updated positions based on how you posed that cage.
To create the cage it will cycle through all your subtools and crank those back to their lowest subdivision level and give you a complete low poly version.
However, for Miku I was using dynamesh for the first time ( her hair ) and getting used to that workflow, I totally forgot about the fact that dynamesh is pretty damned dense - and there are NO subdivision levels - so my cage looked like this:
This made things alot more finnicky and take much longer than they should, due to the whole masking / rotating to pose somethingin zbrush - So remember that if you ever plan to pose your high poly model using transpose master - ensure you don't collapse your subdivision levels or use dynamesh either.......otherwise you're in for a world of pain!
I also wanted to try this 'brilliant' plan that came to me in a dream on how I was going to sculpt this hair for the posed version...... ( yes I dream about 3d wtf :poly127:)
I was going to sculpt the hair out of a flat 3d plane, mask out and delete the waste, then use the 'cap holes' feature to close the faces behind the mesh. I would then have this nice flat planar piece of hair to bend into place nice and easy.
Sounded too brilliant so I had to try it lol, so I made a super quick blob sculpt to test if cap holes would do it.........
Cap holes Fail!
Now I probably could have left the back totally open, or capped in a few other ways I could think of, but they all required extra time and work, or just felt totally sloppy to me. Never mind this was a fun test anyway :P
I ended up using good old splines to create the hair - I basically drew out some splines from top view, made a single triangle and used the extrude along spline tool in max:
With the segment / taper and twist tools its actually pretty easy to get a quick base for further tweaking in zbrush:
I may end up using a much less polygon dense version of something similar for the final realtime hair, but weel see how that goes.
Anyway thats it for this detour, I hope there was some useful stuff in here! I plan on finishing the high and moving on to retopo in the next day or so!
Good Stuff Haz, always a pleasure to read those breakdowns.
As for the eyes, your problem reminds me of a test I had to do in my previous school. The character had to have crazy shenanigan manga eyes.
Dunno if this'll help, but I ended using slightly curved plane to get a eye feeling to them (you can't use spheres, as manga eyes are so big than half a sphere will still go through your face polys when you'll rotate it.)
So I decided to rig my texture. Instead of having the rotation on the axis of the plane, I placed it on the axis of the uv coordinates. It did quite good. As for the multiple expression, you can paint them in your texture. That way, combined with the aformentioned thing, you can actually get a decent "realistic rigging" with anime style stuff.
Something like that, different expressions, the blue circle indicate the space you can move in you uv so you can get them slightly up or down.
Consider looking some square enix stuff for that, like dissidia and their psp games. Those guys are impressive when it comes to animate texture (for facial expression) to counter the polygon count lacking in the handhelds.
Replies
Already said it, but thanks, that's definitely something awesome to share !
PS: I knew the jiggywiggy about the 2D, but omfg, what improvement ! You startled my love for 2D and brightened my spark anew
Agree about the West not being great at making elegant and feminine characters, something to do with comic book reference/different beauty standards maybe?
So looking forward to seeing you make this character haha. The face on your Chun-li came really close to this aesthetic I think :] Are you planning to recreate the pose/expression of the World is Mine figure or do something different? Getting some hair animations on there would be awesome 8D
I'm staying tuned !
Subbed.
I'll make sure not to make people think Im actually in the class for realz
And I was very suprized to see this and thought about what a great coincidence this is!
So far I love what I see, great job!
(this goes out to all of you!)
mind blown
Future Fiction: I will do my best to match the world is mine figurine, but weel see how I go - the hair will be brutal, something I would probably create only for this one single position like the figurine.
Base mesh
I've been asked a fair few times about base meshes, and some tips for creating them. To be blunt, I've never been a stickler for having a really nice base mesh - The last time I built one was about 3 years ago. And have been using it ever since - for guys and girls HAH!
I never really considered them as 'one of those things that you have to have exactly right' and I still dont really believe they are THAT important to your final sculpt, so I wouldnt be too worried about having an awesome one tbh.
For this course though, I decided to build a new one, and try out a few things along the way.
With tools like dynamesh / zspheres etc - a base mesh can be created fairly quickly and simply using these tools no matter what your creating... a 10 tentacled beast to a one legged, one armed zombie. I won't be going into how to use these tools, there are plenty of tuts out there that can help with that. (For the final PDF version of this course I will link some good ones)
Firstly, for a blockin I started with a sphere, and pushed / pulled it around using dynamesh, masking and the move brush. It was my first time using dynamesh in such a manner and tbh I found it pretty quick for doing this.
I used multiple spheres and cylinders for the creation of limbs purely for my own exploration, but you could probably get away with just pulling everything out from one single sphere if you desired.
I especially liked the fact that when you combine ztools into one, and hit dynamesh it cleans up all the interesections just like I wanted, ahhh how far we have come from the boolean modifier (:poly127:) in the early Max days!
Just like when I was painting in 2d, now in 3d I use the 'image plane' tool in zbrush to load in my ortho's just to give a quick reference on whether I was creating something way out of propotion or not.
Always use reference or have it handy!
At this point I'm only looking for a 'shape' so I'm not concerned if its ugly and not looking 'cool' yet. Also dont worry if dynamesh creates some fugly topology we wont be using that junk either.
Once I had the blob done, I exported that shape out to 3dcoat and used the retopo tools to create something with friendly topology for sculpting on! Again I wont be going into how to use 3dcoat, there are so many tuts on youtube available.
Lastly when I've retopo'd everything out to satisfaction I will typically make some final proporion tweaks and adjustments according to my reference ortho's flicking back and forth between zbrush and Max using GoZ.
If you arent using GoZ yet. -5 Points for you :poly127:
NOTE: At this point, I am by no means 'locked in' with regards to proportions etc but its quite possible to do so depending on how much time and effort you invest into the base mesh at this early stage. This can be helpful in a production situation if you need riggers to get started prototyping rigs etc while you progress on your sculpt.
Just be sure to have a nice healthy relationship with them, and that they understand that changes may need to be made, so if/when those changes do arrive they dont want to punch you in the throat and do other things of a less than savory nature.
One thing worth mentioning here is the density distribution for your base mesh. I like to have extra density on the torso, around her bum, breasts and in a few places on the face for obvious reasons.
There are a few tri's and funky bits - I could invest a whole bunch more time cleaning this up more but I havent had any trouble yet and I dont forcast any problems.
Now that I've got my base mesh ready to go, I will start breaking her up into polygroups. This is something I'm in the habit of adjusting and working on as I progress on the model but generally I will always have a group for the arms, so I can hide them and examine the torso alone. This is really good for working the ribcage and getting those nice sexy back curves.
I'll also break up the head and torso. For the Head I break it up into Nose, Eyes, Upper and Lower Lip - this is mainly so I can focus on one area at a time when working on the face. I tend to do this is a circular fashion which ill go into more in the next episode, but basically I'll isolate just one area, and work on it for 5 or 10 min, then move to the next piece and so on, and keep moving around the face slowly bringing it all together.
One last thing to point out, I think its a good idea for everything to be in a fairly neutral position. Like the arms hands, spine arch, shoulders / clavicals, legs / knees and even mouth.
Putting a heap of character into a base mesh is probably only going to be more useful for that one off sculpt you have in mind, and not really effective as a 'base mesh' that you could call upon many times.
*Start Rage*Too many times, in projects that have required me to build characters in a STIFF T-POSE I've had to rely and entrust animators to lower the clavicles and make nice sweaping shoulder silhouettes after I'm done. It almost never looks as good as if it was crafted by an artist. Sorry guys.
If you ever see a game where characters have boxy and square shoulders - you can almost BET the models were built in a straight TPose and someone forgot to lower clavicles / make ammends later on.*End Rage*
Thats basically it for the base mesh section - again I dont think its really the be all and end all for sculpting - you can use so many things these days as a base and still end up with great results.
Experiment & have fun with smooshing things around at this early stage when you still can and definitely dont worry too much about tiny things - youll nail these later on!!
Next: Sculpting Miku's Head!
Thanks again for doing this! Super awesome.
Thanks so much for taking the time to share this, it's really helpful!
I personaly prefer the latter =P
Anyway.. overall body porportion looks spot on, bottom an boobs at right size XD
I have a shit-ton of respect for you for doing this very important thread. :cheers:
Looking forward to see her more detailed
Interesting to see your post on learning 2d. I kind of came at it from the opposite side. I used to be big into drawing, and there's a lot of stuff that never really clicked with me until I started sculpting. I feel like one isn't really more important than the other, you just have to do both to get the whole picture.
Miku's Head - Part Uno.
So I'm going to break the head part of this course into 2 sections because I think its important for me to outline something here about the way I work.
I like to firstly flesh things out, get them to a point where I can see providence and potential in the direction im heading before I move on to another area and try to push it to that same happy place. I can usually see a lot of errors and problems at this point, but the main thing is, Im comfortable knowing that I know what needs to be fixed, and that I can see (without too much trouble) that I will be able to push it there later.
Once I get other parts of the character to this stage I will typically jump around these parts and continue to do so until the whole character is pushed through to the best representation of my current capabilities.
So firstly the difficulty with tackling an anime looking character is that the forms are all super simple, landmark realistic shapes and guides are often barely there or in some cases removed alltogether, face proportions are often extremely different to what you might be used to.
But wait, without all this realistic babble to worry about this should be easier then right ? Wrong.
Without these landmarks that I was so used to finding quickly in my sculpts (and in fact anything I have done previous) I almost instantly found myself lost. I was sculpting away in no-mans land, hoping to magically stumble across something that I could grasp on to. This was a humbling experience - I totally recomend everyone try and sculpt an anime face one day, even if its not your thing, it made me acutely aware of just how little I really know about forms & character art, and how much I have to go.
I had to find SOMETHING to grasp on to, so I turned back to a reference gathering session - something I could directly reference while working, I needed to abolish my instinctive habits and learn new ones. So I made this page of anime style figurine heads:
The things that troubled me the most were:
- The profile of the head.
- The jawline.
- The shape of the cheeks and how they run down to a tiny pointed chin.
- The eyes.
- Making all the inbetween areas of the problematic areas listed above smooth rounded forms.
What have I got myself into!!!!After some study, some intense sculpting, and some more reference gathering. I finaly found something I could grasp on to.
The silly thing was, I felt like I should have been able to see this from the start!
I should trust in what I like to call 'feminine lines' they never lead me astray!! They are everywhere, all over a female face and body. They are contour lines that play together and create pleasing shapes. Here's the one that I found, and despite proportions being so crazy on miku, I found these lines and suddenly things started to click.
I made the decision to not go for the traditional eyeball in the socket I want to really change the eye up and give her a range of expressions at the end so, I'll be painting in different eyes for that as opposed to morphing something into shape.
Once I had pushed the face to a happy place - I felt okay to start blocking in the hair. This was a fairly simply affair for all the hair around her head. I made up my mind that I would model all that stuff into the low without alphas. So I used Dynamesh and zspheres for all of that part.
The only brushes I use are ClayBuildUp, Move, Smooth & Polish.
Here's where she is at now:
For the crazy ponytails, I'll probably write a whole section just on that
As always I like to polypaint stuff into the face as soon as I get it to that happy place I mentioned above. This is to get a feel for how things are going / might look towards the end. It always helps to get all the features on a female face there and to some degree colored, because it always tends to brings out potential faults and errors in forms and make clearer areas that might need a bit more work.
Actually a funny story about the image above. I was looking at a totally different Miku figurine as reference while I was painting these eyes - so they are definitely not the right ones and totally out of whack - look at those eyebrows......whoops!
next.........blocking in the rest of Miku's outfit!
but awesome progress dude!
Yeah, I agree with this. From an animator's point of view this isn't a very good thing, the eyes are one of the most essential parts of the face and if they look dead it's gonna affect the whole character. I'm sure it will work in screenshots though but it seems like a waste considering it's a current-gen character.
I love the progress however. Very detailed post and a great render.
And I totally shook my head up and down when you were talking about how 2D can help your 3D. Just this year I started to form the habit of drawing the human figure. I do environments but I think it's good to just draw, free up your hand and get at it and eventually I will move into drawing objects and what not. But it really is interesting and a lot of fun to consistently figure out the human figure and what not. I feel that regardless it will help me in my 3D when it comes to forms, silhoutte and all.
Really great thread though, thanks once again!
Thanks a lot for these, looking forward to the next chapters.:)
Although the chin may be a bit too tall, and I can't help but think there's something off with the jawline. Could you post a shot of her head without the hair?
Jackablade, Striker, Saman: Okay okay! You guys convinced me, after talking a bit with the awesome Andy Hickenbottom I'm going to take a shot at a 3d eye. It's definitely not going to be the traditional spherical 'eyeball in a socket' approach though - but more of a combination of planar and not so planar shapes that can be morphed and have shader effects applied. I need to be able to fit a full range of anime like expressions here from a suspicious look with tiny squinty barely open and deformed pupils right the way through to giant teary eyed saucers - yet retain that 2d / anime feel about them.
Marshal Banana: Sure man when I finish my high I'll post up some shots without hair
YoutLeaderVal: Take a look here for some really good advice!
So I actually took a slight detour and did something I wouldn't normally do but thought what the hell, I'll add this up here anyway.
I went ahead and did a transpose of my high poly model to see if I could make a nice representation of my reference and set myself a bit of a target to hit.
I still need to repaint her eyes for this, add more hair strands and resculpt the cloth to suit this pose, as well as cleanup the bends in the limbs, fingers and quite a few other things! - but this is good enough for now, its at that happy place I mentioned in my last post. I will definitely come back and polish this up once I've finished with the making a realtime version of her at the end of this course.
I decided to add this detour / exploration here because I wanted to share a few of the things I ran into during this process.
I used transpose master in zbrush to pose Miku, and for those that dont know or havent used it, it essentially creates a low poly cage for you to pose with, it then translates your original high poly mesh to the new updated positions based on how you posed that cage.
To create the cage it will cycle through all your subtools and crank those back to their lowest subdivision level and give you a complete low poly version.
However, for Miku I was using dynamesh for the first time ( her hair ) and getting used to that workflow, I totally forgot about the fact that dynamesh is pretty damned dense - and there are NO subdivision levels - so my cage looked like this:
This made things alot more finnicky and take much longer than they should, due to the whole masking / rotating to pose somethingin zbrush - So remember that if you ever plan to pose your high poly model using transpose master - ensure you don't collapse your subdivision levels or use dynamesh either.......otherwise you're in for a world of pain!
I also wanted to try this 'brilliant' plan that came to me in a dream on how I was going to sculpt this hair for the posed version...... ( yes I dream about 3d wtf :poly127:)
I was going to sculpt the hair out of a flat 3d plane, mask out and delete the waste, then use the 'cap holes' feature to close the faces behind the mesh. I would then have this nice flat planar piece of hair to bend into place nice and easy.
Sounded too brilliant so I had to try it lol, so I made a super quick blob sculpt to test if cap holes would do it.........
Cap holes Fail!
Now I probably could have left the back totally open, or capped in a few other ways I could think of, but they all required extra time and work, or just felt totally sloppy to me. Never mind this was a fun test anyway :P
I ended up using good old splines to create the hair - I basically drew out some splines from top view, made a single triangle and used the extrude along spline tool in max:
With the segment / taper and twist tools its actually pretty easy to get a quick base for further tweaking in zbrush:
I may end up using a much less polygon dense version of something similar for the final realtime hair, but weel see how that goes.
Anyway thats it for this detour, I hope there was some useful stuff in here! I plan on finishing the high and moving on to retopo in the next day or so!
As for the eyes, your problem reminds me of a test I had to do in my previous school. The character had to have crazy shenanigan manga eyes.
Dunno if this'll help, but I ended using slightly curved plane to get a eye feeling to them (you can't use spheres, as manga eyes are so big than half a sphere will still go through your face polys when you'll rotate it.)
So I decided to rig my texture. Instead of having the rotation on the axis of the plane, I placed it on the axis of the uv coordinates. It did quite good. As for the multiple expression, you can paint them in your texture. That way, combined with the aformentioned thing, you can actually get a decent "realistic rigging" with anime style stuff.
Something like that, different expressions, the blue circle indicate the space you can move in you uv so you can get them slightly up or down.
Consider looking some square enix stuff for that, like dissidia and their psp games. Those guys are impressive when it comes to animate texture (for facial expression) to counter the polygon count lacking in the handhelds.
Cheer up bro, 'gonna be awesome
My crit is the hands look to be deformed kind of weird, they look like mutant hands;bloated but spindly
It's sure looking good otherwise
The course seems to be going really well! Especially Funky Bunnies, screen thrustingly good.