the agency

Round 2

Round 1

I've decided to call my second round on this project complete. To save the reader scrolling down, I've put my Round 1 and Round 2 images together here for broad comparison. I'll start again from scratch. There are some problems with the mesh that need to be addressed, and I might extend it a bit too. I might work on the eyes first, like I did with round 2. It might be easier to actually model the eyelids that way. I need to be a lot more careful with my texture painting. I think I'll use all my available images this time instead of just a front and side projection. And of course, I need to practise my hair styling skills. I'm expecting version 3 to be a ripper. After that I'll probably look into facial animation, and definitely extending the mesh to a fuller body.

Posted by christina at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've given Caitlin very short hair so I can concentrate on other aspects of hair apart from styling. It's starting to look a bit more real. I'll start working on eyes, eyebrows and lashes soon, which should finish off this second iteration of my project. It's slowly coming together.

I've picked up a couple of other techniques too. Reading Jeremy Birn's Digital Lighting and Rendering was very useful. He has a very sophisticated approach to 3D lighting. In my current image I've achieved a better highlight in the eyes by moving them to a separate layer, adding a light there that lights only the objects on that layer, and is set for specular light only. Voila, nice specular highlights in the eye without adding to the general lighting anywhere else. The book actually refers to this as Link Lighting, but I figured its implemented via layers in Blender.

Later...

I've added some eye lashes and re-rendered. Lookin' good.

Posted by christina at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The things we do. On my way home from work today I dropped in at my local Borders, and came away with Haircutting for Dummies. So, a little time on Hair Styling, and my 3D models will be looking so smart. I'm hoping it won't be too hard to transfer the skills to the virtual environment.

Posted by christina at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've spent some more time on hair, and am starting to get the hang of it. It's about now that I feel the need for a more powerful computer. Hair takes ages to work on, everything happens in slow motion. Caitlin has a very poor hair cut at this stage, but it's an advance on the image mapped hair she had before. Slowly getting there. I finished a big project at work today, and should have quite a bit more time and energy for this project for a while.

Posted by christina at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've started looking at Blender's particle system for creating hair. Preliminary results are not worth showing here (I think there's already enough preliminary stuff on this blog), but looks promising. It's possible to cut and style hair in Blender. Perhaps I'll end up using a hair stylist to style the hair on my 3d models!!

Posted by christina at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wasn't totally happy with the lighting in the last image I did, so I've simply set the skin to emit in my latest version rather than using lights. It's a lot closer to the actual photographs.

Posted by christina at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I spent some time reviewing Paul Campion's video tutorial on Texture Painting. His approach is to cut up bits of his reference photos and paste them onto the basic Lambert render, blending all the edges as he goes. I guess part of his motivation is that the 3d model doesn't fit the reference all that well, so such a drastic approach is necessary. I had another go at texture painting my model, but ended up using Liquefy for pixel pushing instead. My photos are actually a pretty good fit, given that I used them as reference for modelling.

I had a couple of goes with it, and ended up with something a little better than yesterdays effort. However between saving all the different versions of image files, I ended up forgetting to save the actual blend file, so I've got nothing to show for my efforts. Except experience of course. I feel that I'm getting the hang of it all, and it won't be too long before I've got some pretty good results. I guess then I'll have to thing about hair, and doing some proper eyes. Once that's done, a nearly usable model. Well, a body might be useful, and some clothes. Might get them from somewhere else. I'm pretty happy just working on heads at the moment.

Posted by christina at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, I did some basic texture painting of my version 2 mesh. Better result than the first time. The better eyes help too, although some realistic eyes would help even more. I haven't done any bump or spec mapping, and the colours are all wrong. Still, I'm happy with what I've achieved. From here it's just a matter of time.

Posted by christina at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning I finished the neck, pretty much. Jonathan Williamson has one more tutorial in his series on modeling the female head, which I can't remember watching before. Final tweaks and cleanup. I might pay a bit more attention to it this time.

I'm not sure if this model is a good likeness of Caitlin or not. Texture painting makes so much difference to appearance. Lack of eyebrows, eyelashes, hair, etc makes a big difference to. I find it hard to evaluate form. Overall I like this model, although I'm sure there are a lot of small details I'm not aware of. Anyway, I expect the texture painting and tweaking the mesh to be a fairly interactive process. Guess I'll get better with practice.

Posted by christina at 08:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've decided to put my best result so far at the top of the page, and keep it updated. So, a bit of a hack of the MT template. I might redo the default style sheet sometime - not high on my agenda at the moment though.

Posted by christina at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nearing the end of second draft. This one's still not quite right, but I think it's a bit better than the first one. I'll probably spend a bit more time texture painting this too. I'm pretty busy at work at the moment, but should have some time in a couple of weeks to finish this off and maybe have a third go before Christmas.

Posted by christina at 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The things we photographers do. I did actually take a pic practically straight up Caitlin's nose. Well, I was after a shot of her throat for texturing that area. This part of the head is not well covered by front and side on shots. Anyway, in my second attempt at modelling I'm in a postion to get the shape of her nostrils correct due to my comprehensive photography. So, progressing slowly. I really should be doing other things, but a little 3d keeps my slightly sane while I wade through heaps of boring work.

In the render above I tried a slightly more complex material than a basic Lambert. This one use some subsurface scattering (SSS) to simulate more realistic skin, but the general consensus is that SSS makes skin look waxy. I'm not intending this for my final product, just checking out some of the common options for skin materials so I have a better understanding of the issues. Getting skin right is the holy grail of photorealistic 3d people.

Posted by christina at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Having had a good look at the musculature of the face in my book, I decided to start modelling again with that reference by my side. I was unhappy with the basic eyes I made last time too - they seriously detracted from the overall effect. So as well as starting modelling again I spent a bit of time modelling some better eyes. There's a chapter in The Face on doing that, but it's all done in MentalRay, and I'm not good enough with shaders etc to convert. So I used a tutorial from one of Tony Mullens books to make a reasonable eye and get me started on the issues. The final one will be properly done, but in the meantime this one is a lot better than what I had. And I'm learning the techniques. So, all in all I haven't got very far with my second draft, but I'm taking a lot more care and I hope the result shows it.

Posted by christina at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)