I feel like one of those radio show listeners that calls up and says, “Long time listener, first time caller.” I’ve been a fan of Blender for a long time, but have never really tried to make anything substantial (or even remotely impressive). I’m hoping that an attempt at the Blending Life competition will be a good gateway to even more fun with Blender.
I’ll keep a picasa album of images up at: http://picasaweb.google.com/lukedary/BlendingLife2
Here is my beautiful muse (my girlfriend):
First attempt at a mesh. Definitely need some practice, but so far I’m having a good time, and it has been fun tweaking and seeing where I messed up. Can’t wait to get further along in the process.
Started over with the mesh. Didn’t really like the way the previous one was shaping up.
I think the loops are better in this second revision. I also made the render a little different so I can see things better.
That second mesh is such an improvement, looks really good. Already has character, if just a mouth and a nose can have character that is.
I think is an error to try model in a pose like smiling and so. I think it is much easier to model in the standard “no pose” where the face is relaxed. Then if you want the smiling pose you can always move vertices much easier from the “rest pose” than trying to model it from scratch in my opinion.
I completely agree that this is probably a harder pose to model from scratch. I guess I should be glad that she has such a hard time not smiling around me :). This was the most ‘unposed’ I could get her to be though. I have been trying to kind of guess as to where neutral features would be while I did the initial loops (skipping things like dimples).
It didn’t help that I used my cell phone for the picture. The quality of the photos is definitely making things harder than it might be otherwise. I may go back and take a couple with my SLR so I can get a bit better detail. I also should’ve had her take her glasses off, because I discovered that I don’t have a good side shot of her eye to model.
Luckily we’re supposed to get a bunch of snow this weekend, so I’ll be able to use the time ‘stuck’ in my apartment to do some work on this.
Take the new photos from several distances: I would take one from 1 meter, and another from 3 meters for front, side and 3/4. I think that way you can understand the perspective distortion and figure where really in space each feature is when in doubt because some feature in front don’t match the side because the perspective distortion.
And of course use a 12 megapixel camera or so. Modeling will be much easier if you are able to see details in the skin and you simply place a vertex in these details in front and side view. So you create a “spline cage” of these details and then you simply fill the volume and done.
Hey it does not matter, it’ll save time on rigging -now just model her and be happy!