Finally I got the time this weekend to start off. Because of time reasons I decided not play brave and use Blender in conjunction with
Photoshop instead of GIMP. Although I would like to use only Open Source apps, I’m still not good enough with GIMP and it may slow
me down too much.
I like her natural appearance and interesting, changeable face, therefore I used to photograph her a lot, so I have plenty of resources.
I wanted to make a model of her before, but I never did. Now I got the good excuse to make it!
First I made a sketch of basic lines directly in Blender using subsurfaced edges.
Then I started to build the mesh and give it some basic form. I’m making it with intention to make it animatible and able to change expression
greatly. There are still some unsolved loops.
I made rather complex reshape of the mesh. Also I decided to make her eyes closed in the rest position. It should be possible to animate them with an armature as well as the rest of the model (although I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish the rigging in time). I started the texturing. I want to try the approach I invented (but I’m sure it’s already invented somewhere). The simple idea is to make one UV layout for final mapping and some other UV layers for different photos and map them as neatly as possible to make clearly mapped areas. Those photos I plan to render into the final UV layout and make them layers in Photoshop. Then I’ll just erase unuseful areas and retouch the texture. It should nicely handle all the nasty distortions. That is the idea. I hope it’ll work.
I’ve spent the whole previous weekend on texturing and some time on shader tuning during weekdays’ evenings. Here are some samples of what I got. Now I’m going to make some hair etc.
It freaks me out how realistic a skin some of you guys out there get. I am gonna learn that for sure, but not this year. (That’s why I choose category B.)
Good luck for the competition! I think you got a good chance at placing somewhere at the top!
Lookin’ good, my friend! I would recommend that the insides of the nostrils be a little more pink and less caucasian flesh-colored, and the specular highlights look really yellow for some reason - aside from that, I really love the detail of your texture! Keep up the good work!
Thank you guys for all comments. Well, I think it’s very soon to talk about succession in the competition, because there are already some really good pictures around (and I surely didn’t check everything) and there is still a lot of chances that someone will post a real piece of art and beat us all. Not mentioning, that I still can make a poor picture with great details. You know how easy is to destroy anything. But it is truth, that your notices are very encouraging for me. So thank you again!
BUT - I got stuck a little bit with hair now. The particle system is good, but shading possibilities are somehow tricky to me. The main surprise for me was that Blender has no 3D texturing possibilities! I didn’t realise that before (although I use Blender for longer time I still don’t use it much for rendering). Without it, it is difficult to achieve annealed effect on hair and every near hairs has nearly the same color gradient. I think most of the hair and fur on the Earth are more or less annealed in some way. If someone knows, how to make this trick, advices are welcome. Below is the picture of my best try versus photograph.
@Hunkadoodle: Good observation! I’ll correct it. Thanks!
@Eradicor and Godzilla123: With the ear I’m not satisfied either, so it is not finished. The mouth has no inside at the time. Will have.
Yes, you are right. The dreaming pose looks more natural. I had intention to add some kind of meaning and if possible Blender related. I’d love if it propagate Blender anywhere it appears. I love this tool, you know! But my original plan was to make her smile, wich I wasn’t able to finish satisfactorily in time. So after some wrong tries I made a quick pose with eyes and tongue and not smiling. Which is pity. Another thing is that I made a few bad mistakes with hair just before I hit the Render button and went to sleep. :rolleyes: I still can’t fully understand how certain particle related things work. Generally, I’m not too much satisfied with my work and I intend to continue on this work. The model is basicaly rigged, but I want to bring it to the point, that she smiles or say a word or do anything just by using the rig. The result should be an animation sequence, that I’ll expose here. I hope it is nothing against the rules of Blending Life competition.
Because of time reasons I decided not play brave and use Blender in conjunction with
Seriusly nice work… ear has some bad mojo going on it though.
Another thing is that I made a few bad mistakes with hair just before I hit the Render button and went to sleep. :rolleyes: I still can’t fully understand how certain particle related things work. 