I’m not entirely sure if this is the correct place, but I have been a lot of my works in progress in http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=171084 for a while now, but haven’t received much, if any, feedback on much of what I’m doing. I guess I was wonder if anyone could give me some pointers, especially for the hair, as I think I’m not progressing very well.
Also, this project is technically going to be used in Poser when it’s done. That is, if Poser doesn’t freak out when I try to import and use the objects I’m creating, otherwise, I’ll just still to Blender for the renders.:spin:
Sorry about that. I was thinking I could avoid posting more pictures since I had already done so in my other thread; so, that was my oversight.
Anyway, I’ll post the references and the wip shots below.
References (though there are a lot more than posted):
WIP shots:
So, there you have it!
Also, one of my online buddies mentioned that her outfit’s tail was a bit on the low side, so I’m looking into adjusting the placement when I get a chance. Also, I’ve been playing with the hair a bit since the last image posting, but it hasn’t progressed much and is probably looking much worse for wear. AND, the outfit is is this color only until I’ve finished as it is much easier to work on when it’s not all the same shade of gray.
Well, since I wasn’t sure on how to proceed, I went ahead and just did the flat poly hair setup instead of the solid mess I was attempting to do. I also did not get around to the tail, but meh.:spin:
After trying diligently and loosing a ton of time with the hair, I said screw it and modeled only the parts that will be visible after I finish working on her hood.
Oy…:eek:
Also started working on her hair textures. Sadly, I thought it would be harder to do. Still need to work out the transparent portions though…:spin:
Also, I decided to save on uploading it a dozen times and just liked it to the image on my blog post.
Well, this is the latest work in progress for the Medusa Gorgon outfit I’ve been working on. Yeah, it’s been a while and I know I’ve been slow with it, but meh…
Anyway, I moved the tail up to the appropriated length, changed the hair and tweaked the hood. For the most part, I’m almost done; but, when I was working on the UV mapping for the textures, the entire UV map somehow moved or removed itself and left the parts that I needed textured – the button and hood – are misaligned or the textures no longer show up as I had intended for them. Does anyone know what I did wrong and how to fix it? I ask as whatever happened, it’s keeping me from resetting the UV texture mapping or even seeing the vertecies while trying to edit them in the UV editor window. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Well… I finished the outfit and figured out what I had done wrong with the UV textures without help. Sigh…
Anyway, this is pretty much the finished model. I found that the UV map was altered by mistake when I went to add a texture to a newly edited section on her outfit and Blender went crazy and shifted the points. I ended up having to rework each section’s UV maps, materials, and textures to get everything working. The next problem is that this is the render from within Poser 7 and it doesn’t import the model and display it like it does in Blender; which is why it looks a bit rough. Then again, on export, the total filesize for the .obj files are only… around a total of 150kb give or take. They’re pretty small, and in being so they do not work at all in Poser 7’s cloth room. I guess it needs more polygons now.
So… until I can figure out how to get the clothes to move like cloth, this might as well be the last batch of work in progress shots. And I still need to make the hair transparent mapped so it doesn’t look like it’s one solid piece.:spin:
Too many polies that does nothing to the model. Show us a wireframe…also it looks like she is made of plastic. Because of the material settings. And this is a human generated with make human, am I right?
I thought I had mentioned this before, but I’ll say it again: The outfit is for Miki 2 by Content Paradise/E-Frontier for use in Poser, but can be exported for use in other applications that support the export types. I never made the base figure, nor did I use Make Human either; only the outfit and craptastic hair.
Anyway, the first file is with the outfit under 1x subdivision and the other without, third at an angle without the hair. And yes, I do realize that I messed up on the materials for the outfit with the plastic sheen, but I have almost no idea how to use the material nodes in Blender. ON the other hand, with Poser, I know what I’m doing and did not do anything other than make sure it would import the file correctly and retain the texture information.
And ACK! I totally forgot to make her armbands. I’ll work on that asap.:eek:
Since there was no response from earlier… I can only suppose I either did something wrong or no one really cares.
Anyway… moving on.
Well, I found out what was keeping the outfit from working as a dynamic cloth in Poser, mainly the lack of polygons and trying to add parts of it as constrained groups during the simulation tests. Though, I can’t seem to keep the buttons from turning into malleable cloth like the rest of the outfit, so I may end up having to separate them to keep them from moving. Also added the finger and toe nail textures to Miki 2.
Other notes: Seems as if no matter what setting I have enabled during the cloth simulation, the hood tends to go through the collar from time to time. On the other hand, since they are all pretty much the same color, it’s barely noticeable. The hair textures are pretty much botched and need to be redone along with the UVs. Also, I need to choose a pose that does not force the hood to move so it stays in place and have it collide with the hair so it covers it as well. Oddly enough, doing that tends to result in many ugly messes as it touches the hair mesh, so I’m not sure what to do to cover the area. I also noticed that since the mesh was also colliding with the floor, it seemed to have pushed through her knee, but it was hard to tell prior to creating the render. Oy… I’ll need to adjust the post to avoid that in the future.
Next up, better texture maps for the hair and either some of Medusa’s tattoos for the arms or some sort of snake prop with dots!
And for future reference, is it possible to get similar or better results from the use of Soft Bodies in Blender?
It’s improved quite a bit since the first post. Since you’re having so much trouble with the hair, have you tried using particles for the hair? That would make it much more realistic, but it would take more time to render. To learn how to do it, I suggest just googling or going on youtube and search for a blender hair tutorial. Here’s one that I found that has some really good information in it, but it’s not for beginners. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn1ujPlJbJI
And I was about to write off this thread. Figured no one cared. :lol:
Anyway, I did experiment with particle hair earlier on before moving to modeling the hair with polygons, both in Blender and in Poser; but, I gave up when it practically drove my laptop into the ground.:spin: That’s primarily due to it not having OpenGL acceleration (software only) and probably poor resource management on my part. Plus, I could never get the style to work out for me.
On a related note, I did work on it further and ended up with the following: WIP 11 Semi-Final edition, with added effects.
Both of these were rendered in Poser 7 after I used the software’s cloth room to fit and move the outfit to match the underlying model’s pose. I also used a snake that I did not model, which in hindsight does not work as well as I had intended to and I will eventually replace when I find the time to get around to it. If possible, I’d like to make it like this:
But that’s going to be more of an eventual addendum to the overall project.
The only other thing I’ve done after the Poser renders has been trying to find a way to improve the lighting by using a different renderer, namely LuxRender.
It took about 33 hours to get to the point I figured it would be close to being finished, but I still need to figure quite a few things out and flesh out other aspects of the character.
So, there you have it. Overall, I figure I still have a ways to go, but I have other things I need to work on. I’ll probably come back to it sometime after Christmas. Maybe sooner.
