I’ve gotten a lot of help from the forums here already, so I’m hoping that that will continue. I’m looking for critiques on my process as well as the model I’ve got so far, so I’ll post several pictures.
Here’s the progress of Elphaba. Elphaba is the main character from Wicked, a book that chronicles the life Wicked Witch of the West before The Wizard of Oz story. (I didn’t give her green skin because I thought that would be too difficult for a beginner like me – I know; I wussed out!)
Here’s the mesh before a helpful soul on the forums told me about flipping normals:
Here’s a render with only the color before tweaking. I found and used YafRay, so she’s got the noir look because I haven’t tried messing too much with lighting yet…:
A few questions about the process: (1) Was it a good idea to merge before this step, or should I have kept the linked duplicates to do initial textures? (2) Is color the first texture I should work on?
This has first drafts of spec and bump maps.
Tweaked the lip mesh and all three textures. This is where I have stopped for now. Questions: (1) Does the bump texture belong on the normals channel? Seemed counterintuitive to have white lower and black higher… (2) I feel like she doesn’t have enough blood under her skin, if that makes sense… I look at some final works of really good artists, and there’s this veiny translucency. How does one get that? (3) When I’m finally done with the model, does anyone have any good animation tutorial links?