Well, I’m dusting off the old bird and giving her a body using a combination of the Andrew Loomis ‘ideal figure’ and the Spiderman topology from that other thread I’m too lazy to find and post a link for.
Just starting off in the initial stages of getting the loops right so there isn’t a whole lot to see. The body is way too low poly right now to be able to connect the head, there are a lot of edges coming down the neck and I never built any kind of structure into it to begin with so I think I’m going to get the basic body situated and then figure out where to add and subtract loops to get everything to blend together.
Found a good ear tutorial so that one is going into the bit bucket, was never really happy with it anyway so just covered it up with hair. The modeling isn’t the hard part, where I run into trouble is connecting it to the head mesh in a convincing manner while keeping the upper loop.
Not a whole lot of nudity as of yet either but to be on the safe side…
There is something strange with the way the ear is “glued” to the head…
Could you show us some of the topology, to see the problem tyou might encounter joining the neck and the torso ?
I made the head to learn texturing so didn’t worry too much about the ears. Also need to tweak it a bit since I raised the top of the skull.
Mainly what I’m talking about is the back of the neck where I have to figure out the flow of the muscles into the back before I can combine some of those loops. One thing I learned on my other full body model is too many loops in the body is a PITA so I’m not going to even attempt to bring those loops down until I have a plan. The front isn’t so bad, I could merge it now with no problem but I want to get the body mesh somewhat stabilized first so I don’t have to fight with it to make the clavicle and neck muscles.
Anyway, still working out the flow on Spiderman so this mesh is kind of a mess right now, haven’t even tried to make it look all pretty for the pictures. Oh, the two big ol’ triangles in the middle of the back I’ll fix when I eventually apply the mirror modifier. Yeah, and the 6-pointed stars too.
Got some more work done on the torso, its been slow going because I spend more time studying why a loop is there than making new mesh or pushing around verts.
I think I came up with a good solution for the hip area, no 3 or 5 poles in the hip to leg transition just pure loops. Once I apply the mirror modifier I can merge those triangles on the center line.
Oh yeah, apparently her navel is too high in the reference drawing so I have to fix that.
Little more progress, probably be done by now if I spent as much time modeling as I do surfing the interwebs but no hurry.
Found a link to Spiderman in case anyone actually reads my ramblings. Pretty much have gone my own way as there are a lot of triangles and 6-point poles in places like the knees and shoulder.
Have the head attached to the body now with a re-flowed topology for the neck muscles, still need to add a couple loops so I can make the clavicle but I’ll get to that when I start in on the shoulder and arm.
Mostly worked on the leg trying to get the loops to follow the muscle mass but haven’t come up with a usable solution so far. Think I’ll let it sit for a spell so I can ponder on it.
what’s so unhealty about it? she just looks fit. I’m not really a fan, but this whole anorexia thing seems rather dumb to me. They went through a lot of training, doubling their musclemass. Muscle tissue is a lot heavier, meaning it needs a lot more food to sustain it, meaning if you don’t start eating a lot more, you’re bound to get skinnier. Nothing unhealty about that.
about the model: it’s starting to look good, save for the arms, they don’t seem defined enough.
Messed with the hands a little (they still need work) and made a turnaround–click image (3mb avi). I find that turnarounds help out a lot with seeing what needs work, if I could figure out how to upload an animated gif without it getting converted to a jpg on google’s hosting I would link those and save on some bandwidth.
Still debating if I’m going to model feet or just shoes since my plan doesn’t really involve bare feet (or nudity) and so far everything I’ve modeled is part of The Grand Scheme™. I’m kind of leaning towards just doing shoes right now and making feet in the future if I ever decide to recycle this model again for another project.
Haven’t worked on this too much the last couple days but now I have a complete mesh. Well, other than all the stuff that I need to fix here and there.
Another video turnaround, messed with the settings so this one isn’t quite as large. Just replaced the last vid so the other link will go to this one too.
Been working on the ears here and there so they aren’t quite as horribly bad as they were before, no closeup though because they aren’t that good. I also do a lot of subtle changes whenever something catches my eye so there are a lots of little changes in that mesh.
Yup, ended up doing the shoes because I’m lazy. They still need work.
Kind of a pointless update since there aren’t any big changes but what the hey, may as well bump this since I changed the video.
Mostly have been working on the lower legs but also have been making a lot of little changes all over. Think I finally have the clavicle in the right spot and I slimmed down the sides of the neck where they go into the shoulder some. I really need to start using real pictures instead of just the ‘ideal figure’ drawing and memory to get all the little things right.
Might start in on the mouth next since all that’s left is that and fixing the ear. And maybe shortening the fingers a bit, they kind of bug me.
Work is still going quite slowly, haven’t been putting too much time into this lately.
I have the ears almost fixed and put the eyes from the texture study back into her head. Just need to get the earlobe more flush with the jawline and mess around with the internal structure a bit more to get the ‘Y’ at the top. All the loops are there from before I simply need to get in there and move things around.
The shoes, I think, are done. I might play around with the heel a little to get a more graceful curve, we’ll see.
Also have her bum almost finished in my trip up her legs fixing things. The knees still need a little work though.
Updated the turntable yet again so any of the other links will go to the new one.
Messed around with the lighting setup (a little too much methinks) so it isn’t the best in these test renders. I have the camera and two lights parented to a circle that I just scaled down to get the closeups without changing the lighting at all from where it was set for the turntable animation.
----edit----
Been working on this pretty much all day and am starting to like what I see…
Added a full body shot and updated the turntable once again.
Mostly have been concentrating on the upper body muscle structure but also gave her a breast reduction for that ‘boy built’ look. The original breasts were based on the reference drawing but now I think they are a lot closer to what Keira is packing.
Well…other than still needing to make the bump on the inside of the ankle but that will take all of five minutes. Any more detail seems kind of pointless since my plan involves clothes, probably did way too much as it is but I was enjoying myself.
Being terminally lazy and living by the motto ‘work smart, not hard’ I took the mouth from a makehuman model I have laying around on the hard drive and grafted it to the model because modeling the inside of a mouth and teeth doesn’t look like a whole lot of fun.
Unless someone sees some major flaw that I’m missing I think I’m ready to apply the mirror modifier, grab the rig from my Manga Girl and get busy.
Just wondering how many times I’ll forget the svn blender build I’ve been using segfaults when trying to display constraint ipos and end up losing a couple hours of work…
I think I’m about half way done with the weight painting so far, then on to making shape keys. The knees turned out pretty well and the shoulder isn’t showing any funny behavior, it just needs a little help. The leg/hip transition worked out really well, it looked really good straight out of bone heat but then I started messing with it. Probably done with it since clothing is also on the todo list. The back looks like it is doing something strange in the second posed shot so I’ll have to look into that.
The rig wasn’t too hard to adapt from my other model. I redid one foot and still need to do the other and also have to fix up all the custom bone shapes due to the size difference between the two models. I might try a mesh deform modifier along with bones to do the face, getting a little ahead of myself though.
Having noticed that the big breasted models get all the comments and an unfortunate side effect of the way I rig the chest to help keep things from getting squashed when the spine curves forward lead to the second render.
Gotta play to your audience after all…
Oh, also added a gamma node and re-lit the scene to see if it makes any real difference. Looks kinda funky to me.
Have the body rig finished, red bones are IK and blue FK. Still need to make custom bones for the fingers and make a better one for the FK and IK hand bones since the ones now aren’t that pretty.
Mostly it’s just a simplified mancandy rig with a few extra helper bones for the knee, shoulder and elbow joints.
Need to start looking into face rigging solutions and figure out the ‘best’ one — especially around the mouth since the lattice I did on my other model doesn’t work so well on a more realistic character from a test I did on the makehuman model a while back.
Also thinking about relocating that 5-pole at the edge of the shoulder to see if I can get it to deform a little better with just weight painting before I start in on the shape keys. I also found two 5-poles right next to each other under the arm but they don’t seem to be hurting anything since that part shouldn’t really deform being the side of the ribcage.
It would appear I got a little sloppy around the shoulders with my pole placement…
–edit–
Forgot to describe the head movement.
The floating head either acts as a target for just the head if it is moved around or controls both the head and neck when rotated. Got the idea for that from that Japanese digital popstar character, Miku(?), but I don’t think they have the copy rotation constraints on it.
Ok, trying to reproduce the muscles around the mouth using bones but I didn’t save before closing blender so have to do it all over again…
I had it set up where all the deform bones had a stretch-to constraint to control bones and when the control bones moved around the rest would follow. Seemed to work out pretty good with some quick weight painting to get it to work.
Haven’t seen any mouth rigs that weren’t crazy complicated so I’m wondering if there some hidden problem I’m not seeing with this setup?
My mouth rig didn’t work out do well so I used this one instead. The only thing I left out was the bone that draws in the sides of the mouth when the jaw is opened but I may add it in now that I figured it out. Not too sure if I’ll add the fan bones back in or how I’ll do the rest of the facial muscles.
There are some parent/child relationships missing from the tutorial and sample model but I worked them out with some experimentation.
I think the smile is much better than the last post.
Needed a break from rigging so figured I’d try out the new rig with a walkcycle. Yet another lighting setup since I didn’t want to mess with the one from the turntable animations. Yeah, it could use some work, got tired with messing with it.
Also updated the turntable that the other links go to.
