Am I doing this right? (female character)
polycounter lvl 5
Hi, guys (and gals)! It's been a while (2015) since I last posted here and I was a noob back then. Well, nothing much has changed because I was bedridden for a year, and it's been only a few months since I recovered. So here I am, practicing again. I'm gonna try to make a semi-realistic version of Asuna from the anime Sword Art Online. Here's what I have so far:
The reason why I'm posting even though I'm still in the very early stages is because I'd rather know what's wrong now instead of realizing my mistakes later on and then waste a lot of time mitigating those.
The texture is just a mock-up for me to see how she's going to look like. So...am I doing it right? I mean, topology and all that stuff. Am I doing anything wrong?
Oh, and here's Asuna (she's 16 years old):
The reason why I'm posting even though I'm still in the very early stages is because I'd rather know what's wrong now instead of realizing my mistakes later on and then waste a lot of time mitigating those.
The texture is just a mock-up for me to see how she's going to look like. So...am I doing it right? I mean, topology and all that stuff. Am I doing anything wrong?
Oh, and here's Asuna (she's 16 years old):
Replies
Looking good!
Also, rotate the feet to point inwards more. Your original lower leg/feet part of the pose looks kinda like the feet are unnaturally rotated outwards.
Before/After.
Bring the jaw back somewhat and angle it downwards a touch perhaps.
This is very likely what caused you to misjudge the placement and angling of facial features. This is a very common mistake made by Zbrush users and unfortunately this is a hard habit to shake off.
One way to avoid this distortion is to regularly export a version of your character out of Zbrush to review it in another program, and making adjustment there if needed. Painful, but sometimes necessary.
And @pior unfortunately I have an addiction to Shift + Snapping. Haha. By the way, is there a way to correct the FOV in ZBrush? I tried the suggestion here:
http://sortadone.blogspot.com/p/zbrush-focal-angle-tutorial.html
but it still looks weird in Maya and Marmoset Toolbag.
And you're right, exporting repeatedly is such a pain
Edit: Figured it out (maybe?) Still doesn't seem right but apparently the bounding box distortion is caused by the local transformations option in ZBrush. Try disabling that and see if it helps.
I wouldn't recommend leaving it off, as navigation is really bad without it. But it may be useful for perspective checking.
As for the perspective : this too is has been an issue since forever and indeed I doubt that the conversion trick in that tutorial is in any way reliable. Especially since the face of the dog doesn't match up on the screenshots to begin with.
Good luck !
@AtticusMars: Thanks for your suggestion. What I actually used to do was turn off "Dynamic" in perspective every now and then to check. I tried what you suggested and it gave the same result as turning off "Dynamic", so yeah, I guess it has something to do with the bounding box (although my method and your method had different camera rotation axes, but it doesn't matter because we're not using it for navigation anyway). I said "used to do" because I realized it's still not the same as when I just export to Marmoset to check from time to time, so there's really no point in doing that, I think. So yeah, I think exporting is the best method as of now.
Although I'm curious whether it's technically impossible for ZBrush to have a normal perspective view instead of the weird thing we have now.
From the front, the head looks great. However, I still think you should edge the jaw back ever so slightly more, but that could just be my own facial structure preference.
The legs look a whole lot better now
Looking forward to seeing how the character develops.
Well, I just have the impression that pulling the jaw's edge back further will make her look like she has very defined strong jaws. I mean, that is nice, but I just don't think it would fit the character. Yeah, it's probably just your preference because I've seen people with a jaw like my character. But the very first one I did was really wrong (or maybe just not ideal) and I'm glad you corrected me.
As much as I wanna progress more, I have been busy today with other stuff and all I could do tonight was figure out the FOV thing. I exported the mesh to Marmoset and then used ZBrush's See-through mode to compare.
Here's the result:
For scale reference: The character's height is 172 cm (she's actually 168 cm according to her profile, but the pose is tiptoed, so I added a few more).
I don't really want to render in Marmoset at 16 FOV. Ehh, the one with FOV of 45 doesn't look that bad anyway. Or maybe I'll just cheat and scale her down a few centimeters so I can use 45?
Tomorrow I'm planning to start doing the hair and eyelashes (and maybe eyebrows too) using XGen (because Fibermesh hates me) because I wanna see how she looks with hair before I put clothes.
- No matter how one tweaks it the Zbrush perspective is only just a 2.5D trick anyways, it will never be accurate. I think it is important to acknowledge this, embrace this limitation and be ready to work with and/or around it even if that means eyeballing things. I personally find these issues so limiting that I simply never start anything directly in Zbrush ; the visual feedback given by the program is just way too off and not reliable.
- Regarding other 3d environments : first and foremost I would recommend you to learn more about actual real world photography. Train yourself to identify lenses just by looking at photographs and movie shots. Once you are able to tell apart something shot with a 50mm from something shot with a telephoto, you'll be able to be very proactive with your decisions when working within a 3d environment.
Many 3d artists tend to be very passive with their decision making ("Oh, I'll move that here to see what happens ... and let's see what it looks like if I load this or that sky HDR ..."). I believe that this is counter-productive. A much more valuable approach is to try to pre-visualize things early on, and then execute on that.
What I mean by this vague statement is : as soon as you develop a keen understanding of the way lenses (and the human eye !) work, you'll be able to direct any 3d app to do what you want. This is why illustrators coming to 3d tend to master the medium very quickly and produce impactful results, whereas 3d artists with no prior knowledge of illustration or photography tend to struggle for a while with core picture making concepts.
All that said : good luck !
FOV 16 is 85.38 mm, while FOV 45 is 28.97 mm, which is near 24 mm, so, looking at my previous post, I'd say the distortion is actually pretty normal and there's nothing wrong with my model after all. That makes me so happy.
I haven't been able to do much yesterday because it was Sunday, With little time left, all I did was tinker with XGen in Maya 2017. I was planning to start the hair, but I realized that being a total noob to XGen, I'll be better off starting with something simple like eyelashes. Honestly, I thought it was going to look terrible, but after two hours (that includes the time I spent pressing the wrong buttons because I didn't know what I was doing. lol), here's what I have achieved:
I did this a few days ago but I didn't wanna post with such little progress:
yey, eyelashes on fleek (or is it?).
Oh, and don't mind the missing the caruncle in the eye (the pink fleshy part). I was just experimenting with making the eyes have more depth and I have to retopologize that part.
I have been trying my hands recently on the interactive groom tool but I'm not really comfortable with it yet. Tips, anyone?
So I decided to go through my usual way with XGen (place a guide, scale it 'til it's long enough, rotate it in the right direction, rebuild, then sculpt the guide), but recently I've come upon a big stumbling block: braids.
I followed this tutorial
https://youtu.be/MLCpswLL6D4
step-by-step, but for some reason my braid looks like this:
like the primitives are trying to follow a shortcut along the way instead of sticking with the guides. I posted in the technical talk section, actually, and someone suggested tube groom.
So here's my attempt:
but it still failed. I also tried masking the other parts but when I paint a mask, the paint goes everywhere, like polka dots:
I don't know. It's been a slow progress.
Still hoping I'll learn to do it right.
By the way, it would be great if someone can tell me how to make normal maps using XGen.
Here's how it looks in Maya's viewport (lambert shader)
The weird thing is it turns greenish when I render it in Marmoset Toolbag (please don't mind the skin's texture. It's just a placeholder, and so are the eyelashes)