Natsuki - Asian Female (nudity)

Finally I found some time for personal projects as I was swamped with work lately. For ages now I wanted to create an asian female.
I thought I take the opportunity to take those intrested along my journey, find some intresting intercultural facts, get some discussions about topology going, just make a “dairy” of Natsuki’s development.
Once done I plan to make Natsuki a CC download for all of you.

Right on, 3 days ago I pulled some reference out my archives and started. My first volitional problem came up pretty soon. The eyes.
As 100% europen bred, white as someone living in a basement can be, it was quite an adventure to “feel” the shape of an oriental face.

First task was to find out what the actual differences are. And surprise, there are almost none, the famous almond eyes are just like occidental eyes with slight differences.
Consulting the endless informations in the internet and reading into some plastic surgeon papers it became clear to me pretty soon.

  • First big difference is that asian people got a bigger eyebrown fat-pad and it sits slightly lower, filling more of the upper eyesocket.

  • Second difference is the Levator Aponeurosis(the muscle that allows you to open your eyelids). For occidental people it sits pretty high in the lid, extending down, so if we open our eyes, our eyelid almost rolls up to a single bulge. Asian people have a second fold caused by the low sitting muscle in the eyelid. It pulls the lid up, forming a fold in the middle of the eye. So this is either causing a double eyelid, or if it is not folding a “hanging” eyelid. Thats what is causing the almond shape along with:

  • the Epicanthal Fold. It is a difference oriental and occidental people have in common. Its a web of tissue overlapping the nasal corner of the eye. For some its more distinctive, for some less and overall its more common and more distinctive for asian people and can have many different shapes.

I guess thats enough information for now. If you want to know more about it I recommend this site here for information on:
Difference between Asian and Occidental Eyelids
Asian Epicanthal Fold

With this information and after staring at asian eyes for 2 hours it was all clear and I was good to go.

I was all eager to practice organic face loops again, and pretty soon I came up with basic loops I could work with.
In order to have something to present to you guys I did some rough texture work, nothing fancy, really, just some projection painting from my actual reference images.http://gallery.arexma.net/ba/natsuki/wip_07052010_TN.jpg
Blender Internal, SSS, AO, Raytraced shadows and reflections, 24sec/frame

I tried some new things (at least for me):

  • I noticed asian people got distinct cheekbones, so I set the key-knot for it slightly higher and more to the back.

  • I also noticed chubby cheeks on many reference images, that is why I broke one of the faceloops and redirected it to outline the cheeks.

  • Then in the outer corner of the eye I pulled the loops back along the head instead of curving them back down into the cheeks. I´ve seen both lately, but I think when aging the base mesh, or for eye mimic those loops will do better.

  • And last but not least I didn´t use the “common” boxhead, I tried to keep the flow all from the face up, over the forehead, back over the skull and down to the spine in one nice flow. I noticed in the make-human-project they actually went to use those topology too.

Now for the obvious flaws I am aware, but hey its WIP =)

  • The ears are still a bit wonky, but rather than reusing “my ear” I made back in the stoneage and which I dont like anymore, I made a new ear.What can I say, I hate ears. IMO one of the most complex bodyparts with its doublespirals and twists and folds. You got to hate it… Stay away from them until you´r really familiar with organic modelling =) However, ears still need work.

  • The back of the skull looks like a plank hit her. I had to cut some new loops to attach the ears, that what happens when you´r too lazy to reshape the skull, minor glitch though.

  • The chin… I am not quite sure yet, but something really bugs me there, I am missing a nice loop somewhere.

  • Texture and material, but thats for the final works, for showing stuff with a nice look its ok as it is. As I mentioned above, it´s just projection painting and SSS.

  • And last but not least the outer corner of the eyes. They are not bad, but still need some work, after doing many heads I still got troubles fitting the eyelids around the eyeball =)

Task ahead is actually the body, I want to get some distance between me and the face for now. As for the body, I will start from scratch as well, I want to try some things topowise and need the practice =)

If you got until here you already read a lot, I hope I had some intresting stuff to offer.

Finally some trivial informations =)

Project: Natsuki
Kanji: 夏希 / Hiragana: なつき

夏 - natsu - the summer
希 - ki - the hope

So you know where the name comes from. It’s “summer-hope” a nice japanese name. As we all know many of us are having a hard time finishing projects, well I hope to finish mine this summer =)

For the current state of the project:
References, Research and base mesh with loops: ~2 days
Nose and Eyes: ~1 day
Ear and textures: ~ 1 day

Plan is to model it, texture it and rig it. I got some 2.49 rig I made a while back with a fake ik spline spine, breast movement, respiration movement and stuff, but I think I will use this project to get into 2.5s rigging. I hope no huge commercial project comes up eating away my free-blending time.

I had time for an update - well took long enough but I had more important things to do.
The projects name is a lie from this point on, but I got used to it :wink: (and we got another summer coming up)

I started with the body and as you can see in the image, I tried some unusual things in the topology it looks all twisted yet flowy and so far I am quite happy.

  • At the shoulder you can clearly see the center of rotation for later in the front and back view and I hope to get a nice deformation with this topology.

  • I made (or at least tried to do) the torso mainloops X shaped rather than horizontal and vertical. You see how the loops originate from the atlas area (back of the neck) run down the back of the chest, upfront along the ribcage and over to the other side at the front. I think it is very clear to see how I portioned the body, it is almost like a butcher takes apart cattle - it is very easy to spot the borders between loop areas.

Some might dislike the proportions, well that’s a matter of taste and those proportions are actually pretty average for asian women and in the left of the image you see the reference model overlayed with the wireframe.

I like the proportions as they are imperfect and it is much more believable than the perfect woman. And if my model lifes up to my plans, it should be very easy to reshape the proportions anways.

I also had hands and feet alright. I made the feet from scratch, the hands I reused an old mesh, I disliked both and didn´t want to carry “old topology” in a new model, so I deleted them.

I also overhauled the area where the ears are attached to the head and got rid of the flat back of the head - hard to spot in this image but not really important.

http://gallery.arexma.net/ba/natsuki/wip_23032011_TN.jpg

I am not so happy with the forearms there´s still some work to do - but I guess it´ll change with the new hand.
I also think the knee needs some attention, currently it will deform over a polygons instead of an edge, but I´ll guess I got to try what will work better in the end.

Timetable (very rough as I am too lazy to properly use my project tracker for private stuff)~ 2 days for the torso with arms and legs
~ 1 day pushing vertices back and forth tweaking topo
~ 1 day attaching the old hands and modeling new feet
~ 1 min to delete hands and feet again :eyebrowlift2:

Oh yes RAAWR, now give her some hair you little pervert. (Kidding) Looks very good :wink: She doesn’t look like a photo model but more human which I think is nice :slight_smile:

Long time this thread was dorment, so was the .blend.

I found some time again to dedicate to this still alive project. I did some minor updates a while back, another project came in and I had to stop, picked work up again, had to stop again and meh.
But this week I had some time to spend with her. :wink:

I added hands and feet, deleted huge portions of the mesh again, the upper legs, the whole backside and crotch area, once I fixed that I deleted the shoulders, and lastly the whole back to overhaul it and add some new loops.

So far it’s pure polygon modelling and I went away from the pure x-shaped topology, but not completely back to the horizontal-vertical topology, rather some hybrid. I am curios how this mode will work out deforming, I might give it a quick test with rigify to pinpoint problematic deformations.

I deleted the huge portions over and over again, I was experimenting with various poly and edgeloops all over the place. By now I got over 150 .blend, once she’s done I might take the time to show a timelapse of the changes to visualize how she evolved.

What’s funny is that this version still matches the reference images perfectly, yet she doesn’t look like a russian farmers wife anymore, she’s much more petite, the different topolgy also gave me another perception of her “volume” and the “flowier”-flow on the wireframe does the rest.

I wanted to check out the overall appearance of the model, leading me to my beloved lightstudies, nothing shows odd dents and pulps better than extreme lighting with high contrasts.

Seeing it looked very boring I got my bucket out, threw a few materials inside and made a traditional 3 layer SSS node material consisting of epidermal, subdermal, backscattering, diffuse and specular.

Being happy with that I also had to check out if the material is satisfying, so I made a lighttest as well.

And here we go:

Natsuki Turntable Video 720p:


It might seem dark, that’s due to the high contrast I used, best viewed in 720p fullscreen to have no white shining over the video from the webpage.

Natsuki Lightbust Video 360p:


The light is still shining out the mouth through the back of the head somewhere, that’s because there’s no mouth cavity yet, but looking at the ear the animated backlight nicely shines through the thin flesh. Needs some tweaking but good enough for this test.
Sorry, no vimeo for this one, vimeo says it will not upload it, I am a liar, this is so small it can’t be a video.

Images (click for 720p versions)

Front:
http://gallery.arexma.net/ba/natsuki/natsuki_wip_20_01_2012_front_TN.jpg

Back:
http://gallery.arexma.net/ba/natsuki/natsuki_wip_20_01_2012_back_TN.jpg

Right:
http://gallery.arexma.net/ba/natsuki/natsuki_wip_20_01_2012_right_TN.jpg

Threequarter:
http://gallery.arexma.net/ba/natsuki/natsuki_wip_20_01_2012_threequarter_TN.jpg

And that’s where I am now.
I am still not happy with the leg/knee area and the arms, especially the elbow area, also the tailbone area, the spine and the hollow of the knee needs some love.

Once that’s done, I´ll add a mouth cavity with tounge and teeth. Do a few deformation tests and after that it’ll be off to unwrapping and texturing.

The next really big obstacle will be hair and photorealism, which is the ultimate goal.
I also got some nice ideas for scenes already but that’s in the future.
I am also not sure if I´ll model and simulate the cloth, or sculpt it, retopo and bake, most likely I’ll try various methods. Suffices to say that she’ll not stay hair and clothless and she’ll get a nice scene.

Another touchy topic is the genitalia. I am not sure yet if I am going to add it, it’s not really necessary but for the artistry and completeness I´ll most likely add it.

Also as we’re at this nude topic already, she looks rather young looking at her narrow hips and small breasts. Rest assured the reference model is mature, it´s 3d.sk footage, it’s just an results of the body shape of Asians. I think it’s commonly known that Asians have a different aging process. They look the same, around 20 from 14-40, then they look like 30 from 40 to 70 and then suddenly turn into a 120 year old shrunk version of themselves :wink:

All is done as usuall in my still beloved Blender Internal, but who knows, by the time I am at material/rendering Cycles already has SSS and this’ll be a nice test.

That’s it, thanks for reading.