...And More Texturing.

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Saw this music video by "Oh Land" yesterday night and was suddenly inspired to use the same makeup for "Mother" in my project. (She's the lady in the frame in the Red Room). First I did a [really ugly] painting to see if I liked the makeup in combination with the face shape and hair, then I started mapping it out. I also played with making her appear older via a rougher bump map with some light wrinkling. Wanted her to still have a timeless appearance like Streep or Mirren.

This was fun because I got to contrast the robotic appearance of "Anna" with slightly more humanistic detailing and skin-tone variation in "Mother."

I also spent a bit of time on a proof on concept for a matte & metallic wallpaper treatment. The result is pretty ugly, but I think I could refine this to be something really wonderful.

More texturing.

Painted Anna up the other day and have slowly been refining her. It's so exciting to see this character go from being a smooth gray model to something that feels very fleshy and real (in the right light setup). Her textures were significantly easier than Gaston's since the her skin is basically all the same color and texture. Her hair was also a breeze because I setup the uv maps in such a way that all I had to do was draw a bunch of vertical lines. (much simpler than the 3-day mudbox-fest that was Gaston's coif).

Playing around with some really cool possibilities for the material on her shirts. The floral-satiny texture is simply an old wallpaper piped in as a spec map. Mental Ray does the rest!

I'm still alive, I swear!

Here's some of the stuff I've been working on. See more at my process blog here.
The lady is the 3d version of her. Although her robotic expression could use some work!

Rigging

Started watching some rigging tutorials the other day and began the rig for "Anna." It's so exciting to see this character "alive" after spending so much time modeling! Here's a little taste.

Dress up!

This has been a lot of fun - began modeling the clothes for the female figure, Anna. She'll have a couple different outfits. I also have to do a gigantic billowy skirt which I presume will be no fun at all for me to model! Spent some additional time experimenting with "sheer" materials (not shown) that I think will turn out pretty cool.
It's funny how long it takes to make the little details, like placing every single diamond and jump ring for her necklace, when it's doubtful that the camera will ever get close enough to see. I'll probably take a bunch of close up glamour shots once the scene is set up to get that extra bit of satisfaction. (Also need to spend more time figuring out how to render diamonds - didn't get the kind of sparkle that I want!)

Gaston

I've been slowly chipping away at this model for a couple weeks and finally finished him, did UV layouts (what a learning process that is), and custom maps. I'm regretting my decision to make his poodle puff a separate piece of geometry. Would be nice to see it smoothly flow from his head, but I think changing that will completely ruin my UVs and I don't want to take a step back at this point.
I played with a couple ideas for how to do his hair, actually. Was considering making it out of transparent layers of polygons like in a video game. Also played with "Fur", but didn't think the results would mesh well with the rest of the scene. I ended up sculpting it in Mudbox and hand-painting finer strands in Photoshop. Looks a little plastic-y, need to play with that when I get it into the correct lighting situation.
Added in a lot of little details like his belt buckle and shoe laces that were fun to put in, but probably are too small to be seen in the final render. I blew the bump maps out a little bit more than they probably should be just so that when he's rendered from a distance you can see the texture better. Next time I design characters I'll put more thought into scale!

He still needs a shirt or jacket or something. I also need to make it look like he's bloodied up...

Raptor II: Texturing

This is my product from a painting/texturing demo on Digital Tutors. So exciting to compare the hand-painted textures/bump/spec maps on this to the original process-texture version that I did a few weeks ago!