Baggage

[sydney075]

Most Current Progress:

So I’ve been in lurking mode for far too long. I’ve started a long term project and just trying to make a little progress each week.

First is a block out of the intended final image. It has been thrown together using placeholders from BlendSwap. Everything will be changed out in the final version.

Next is what I have started of the character that is sitting on the bench. I have sculpted head in zBrush Core. The hair was retopo-ed and reworked poly by poly in Blender and took forever.

So that’s where things are at right now.

[sydney075]

Next stage of progress (about 4-5 hours). I have the body pretty much done for the first character. Though “done” is an exaggeration since I know I will probably change a few things in retopo. Not sure what step I’m going to move onto next as this has been draining.

[sydney075]

Some more progress. First off the character now has a name, Holly. I’ve more or less finished retopo of her head though I may still clean up a few tri’s before all is said and done. Also I went ahead and threw together some very rough materials just to get a feel for where I may go after the full retopo. The texturing is completely temporary at this point.

[sydney075]

Some more progress. It turns out that the head subtool got shifted slightly before i started blending all the parts in Zbrush. I will be double and triple checking in the future because doing the retopo on a model that has two mirror axis’s really really sucks. That said here is Holly completely remodeled.

She also now has eyelashes and the hands were completely redone based on one I modeled a few years ago. I know that she has no toes but she will be wearing shoes in the final image. Next up could be proper clothes, rigging, or texturing but, I’m pretty happy with the progress thus far.

[sydney075]

Some more progress today as I taught myself how to use rigify. Much better than I remember hand painting vertice weights and manually placing bones back in college. Still a few things I’m unhappy about and it’s bringing my poor little tablet to a halt. Will probably move on to clothing and texturing and save final rigging and posing for the laptop which is much beefier but less convenient.

This is an intentionally rough pose just to get an idea of where I’m headed in the final image.

[sydney075]

Continuing on and in the same vein of spending far too long on each part, here are Holly’s boots and placeholder socks.

[sydney075]

Running a bit behind as I wanted to have my next step done on Monday. Anyways a first attempt at the shorts.

I’m not too happy with them even though they fit the style I’m going for. Maybe I will like them better after texturing and adding stitching.

The other thing bothering me is the belt, mainly because i wanted to make a woven one but it just wasn’t working. I’m not going to put holes in the belt until I’m sure if I’m going to stick with it or not.

[sydney075]

I wasn’t happy with the previous shorts so I reworked them completely.

New shorts:

For the shirt I went very simple and yes the logo like so many other things is a placeholder. Anyways Holly is finally clothed!

As for my next step, I just don’t know yet.

[sydney075]

So I finally got around to doing the texturing. Next up rigging then I can finally move on to Andrew or part of the scene.

[humanartist]

good job on this model. I noticed the design makes the focus on her face, good job.

[sydney075]

Thanks. Her expression and the out stretched hand will be the focus of the final image so I’m glad to see her face is reading as the focus already.

[sydney075]

First off I HATE rigging. Whew now that’s out of the way, Holly is finally rigged and posed. She is as close to finished for the final image as I am going to focus for now. I still need to do proper eyes and give her a few accessories but, those can wait. I may also tweak the pose and bring back her freckles some more but, that can also wait.

Enough rambling here is the newest render.

[humanartist]

It’s looking great, Would like to see the next character finished.

[sydney075]

Thanks. Considering how long it took me to create the first character I think it will be a little while before I get the second one done. I think my next step might be a bit of work on the scene before I start him.

[sydney075]

So it’s been far too long since I made any progress. I could give reasons but they really don’t matter. What does is I got a motivational push to start working on this piece again earlier this week.

I’ve got the bench modeled now and aside from some work on the wood texture I’m considering it finished. I am aware that it is slightly floating off the ground and that will be fixed in the next render.

Enough talk, on to pictures.

[sydney075]

Long time no post. Life got busy again. I’m more or less happy with the grass I have now though I want to add a little more variation, maybe some flowers and or leaves. Anyways it is a particle system based on a single small clump of grass I modeled. Sidewalk clipping will be fixed once I make the sidewalk. Most renders going forward will probably not have it enabled (until the final) as it is too much for my little tablet and even my workhorse laptop took several hours to render it.

[sydney075]

Can’t believe I have stayed away from this for so long. Hopefully I should get to keep working on it this time. Threw back in the other placeholders and reworked the grass material a bit. Also drastically changed the lighting and it may be a bit too much now. Anyways some progress is much better than no progress.

[sydney075]

I went ahead and did something I’ve been trying to ignore. After dialing back the lighting a bit I started trying to clean up the textures on Holly. When I originally did them I had a mistake and ended up having to merge two different sets of textures which resulted in a numer of glitches. See the corner of the eye and the temple for examples)

After relighting.

I ended up deciding to start from scratch and have only done the head texture, not the body. I think the result looks much better and looks like she has life in her skin now. Next up is to rework the body texture and then maybe I’ll start on the other character.

After re-texturing.

[sydney075]

I took one more pass at tweaking the head textures to tone back the tan and bring the freckles out more. I then added some light glossiness to the lips and more to the eye shadow to make it look like a metallic pigment. I also gave her some proper eyes finally then did the body texture.

In the full render you can see I toned back the radioactive grass and tweaked the lighting a bit more. The denoising on the render seems to kill the freckles at this size but, I know they will come back in the final render size/quality. At this point I think I am finally ready to call Holly done and finally ready to move onto Andrew.

[sydney075]

I know I said I was done with Holly before but I think I actually am now. The skin shader and the blotchiness was bothering me. So I went back and started doing test renders at full size but only a small section at a time. After about 2 dozen I finally liked the new SSS settings and some other tweaks to the base shader. After seeing the full size render that took 9 hours I think this is where I leave it and move to the next character.

Note: Full size is much larger. Click image twice to enlarge.

Only Holly was rendered for this test, hence the background.