@chipmasque: Are you going to give the .blend files out for her? She looks like a wonderful character.
Thanks, dleri!
I won’t be releasing this particular model, but once I get it completed, and the rig finished and tested, I plan to use it to create a “universal male” and “universal female” mesh for eventual release. My idea is that an undetailed figure will be more useful, in that it will incorporate the base topology needed for the rig to work best, but also be highly customizable. I’ll be using these “universals” to create new characters for the movie I’m planning around the Neziņa character.
I still have a long way to go, though, before that stage of the project.
A Star Is Born
After doing some work articulating the neck muscles, I decided to render up a classic Hollywood “starlet” portrait pose from the middle of last century. True to such ultra-glam images, this one required a little touch up (a few small stray hair strands, mainly) but for the most part this is exactly as rendered,
This is looking really good, that last pose was fantastic.
wonderful work on this one so far. It’s interesting to follow your progress on her
A Bit More Casual
Getting away from the hyper-dynamic posing for a while to check on the overall status of the model in terms of proportion and deformations, I chose a casual stance with just hint of tension in the set of the shoulders and the sideways glance (borrowed from the shot above, btw). It’s in these more relaxed positions that the deformations have to work very well, and though there are a few places I’ll be tweaking yet again, for the most part everything from the hips up (except the facial rigging, of course) is done.
Next will be the knees, and then the very tricky adaptation of my Othello face rig to this model; I’ve done this before on another female head-only model and though painstaking, it nonetheless worked quite well. Then I’ll be able to show off her best feature – her fangs! :evilgrin:
3dementia & DivineRAIN, thank you much for your comments. Glad you like what you see.
Mercedeez Deep Knee Benz
The knee joints turned out to be more of a challenge than I expected, both due to some idiosyncrasies of cessen’s rig (easily overcome) and my wish to get more naturalistic deformation here than I did with the Kata character model.
Besides insuring that the knees didn’t become too pointy with deep flex, I wanted to introduce some compression in the thigh & calf at the inside of the joint, and also increase the thigh & calf volumes as if the muscles were bunching up. Most of this was pretty straightforward but I found that the kneecaps needed a lot of finessing to look right at all parts of the flex range:
Knee Flex Demo Password = chipsvids (due to nudity)
Since both they and the thigh muscles that attach at the knee have a very different look at the extremes, it was the intermediate stages that needed tweaking. While the final result is not anatomically perfect, I think it works well enough to pass muster given the stylization of the rest of the model.
BTW, this website is currently very ill, it took me more than 30 minutes just to get this post up successfully. Please fix?
she’s deforming quite nicely, it’s all very impressive n inspiring. I’m in the process of rigging my character n trying to get some nice deformations without corrective shapes, this makes me wish I could understand your rig a bit more. lol
Getting a grip…
Lots of fussing about with the hands modeling & rigging, using a grip on her sword as the basis for refining the rig & the deformations. This included a few shape keys to fatten the fingers as they flex & grasp, and to emphasize the bumps of the knuckles. One special-purpose shape key trims her fingernails for the “human” look – as a vampire they are much longer & pointier.
Started refining the costuming, adding an undergarment that uses a more compete cloth material, plus my first attempt at tying a virtual knot – the lacing of her bodice is an actual “shoelace” bowed knot, kind of tedious to do but I think it looks good.
Next step is rigging her face, using my Othello face rig. That promises to be fun :rolleyes:
I really… really… really wish I was as good with people as you.
you are very inspiring. Both this and Kata model, I can notice you love the female figure? I sure do, but so far haven’t modeled any human character.
Please consider doing a video tutorial in the following months for the bone deformations on the shoulder and anything useful you learned. I don’t know if you like teaching, but I’m willing to pay you, seriously, not only because I know you have the knowledge I want to have, but for your great work and inspiration (although I didn’t like some animations in Kata, overall is very good, hope this project doesn’t take you so long!)
Expressing herself…
Thanks for all your comments, folks! Much appreciated! Yes, Brachi, the female figure is a favorite subject of mine, but I’ll be doing male characters for this project as well. I wanted to get the the main character well-established before tackling those, however. And down the road I do plan on making the work available – in a more generic form – so folks have a “character kit” they can customize for their own concepts. Way down the road, though 
I’ve integrated the Othello face rig into the overall rigging scheme with good results – I’ll no doubt be tweaking the vertex weights as I develop an expression library, but the majority of the work is done except for the eyebrows mesh – a separate object that I’ll need to match to the main figure mesh weighting. The 2.5x interface makes this much simpler than earlier versions, though still a bit tedious.
I’ve revised her eyelashes for a number of reasons, as well as the modeling around the eyes themselves. I ended up faking one aspect of the eyelashes – their shadows – because Blender can’t imitate the diffraction of light that such thin objects cause, so the actual eyelash shadows are too distinct. So I made a separate shadow-casting object for them. I’ll be adding add a “tears” effect for the gap between eyeballs and lids, as I did with the Kata character, likely a separate mesh again as well, but that has to wait until the main vertex weighting is finalized.
The teeth proved more problematic than I thought, both in positioning them in the face (it’s different for every character) and in the material, which ended up taking a great deal stronger SSS Scale value than I originally used. Rendered by themselves a lower value looked fine, but in context, I had to use nearly 10x the value to get the proper translucency. They’re still a bit too bluish, so I may tweak the diffuse a bit to warm them up. The uppers have a shape key for the vampire fangs, which I’ll be showing off later after the eyebrows are integrated and her fearsome vampire expression finalized.
Oh, how you’ve changed, my dear…
Her vampire persona, complete with fangs. It’ll be interesting trying to develop a good blood-stained look for her after-dinner appearance.
Eyebrows now integrated, but in need of more testing, maybe even revision, since they don’t react as well as I’d like.
Gonna take a short break now since my first grandchild (Eleanor Francine) was born early this morning and joyous family times always trump Blender. But back soon enough.
You really need to begin modeling a silver bullet. Hurry up!!!
Now it’s “officially” a movie project…
…'cause it has a poster! And a tag line, of course.
Two composited renderings here, the main beauty render and one to kick up the highlights on the teeth, assembled in Photoshop, where some minor touchups were also done.
This character is very close to finalized (“close” because who knows what tweaks the actual animation may require?) so I’ll be moving on to another using this model as the basis. This will test the feasiblity of a “universal male/female” pair that I plan on making available for purchase later on, fully rigged and ready for remodeling.
I’m also periodically working the treatment and story line toward a true screenplay/script.
chipmasque:
Really great work. I mean, Kata was very good… but this one is even better! I’m enjoying this thread.
I have a request: I understand your not releasing this model (and don’t blame you for that one bit) But would you consider releasing just the shoulder rig and arm? As you said, shoulders are a huge trouble spot, and I would like to study your solution more.
Thanks, MJ60! Glad to hear that the lessons learned on Kata are improving my work.
As mentioned, I’ll be releasing the entire rig, with both male and female models (generic modeling so you can customize), but given today’s economy and the amount of work I’ve put into this project, I’m going to package it all up for sale. Hopefully this will help finance production of the movie as well. If I don’t start generating more significant income from this stuff I’ll have to put it aside and find a make-work paycheck-is-all-it-is job, sad as that will be for me personally.
Congratulations, beautiful model, I like her very much. Excelent mobility for shoulders and hips, the best I’ve ever seen. Very good job!
You could use corective bones for the knees, they realy don’t seem to have a good deformation in a bending of more than 90 deg. Just check out my thread: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=205003 I’m beginner in rigging and I have made some more simple armatures for a fewer polygon meshes, but maybe it will give you an idea about how to improve the the knee joints.( if you scroll down you will find a finished 3d girl, just tell me what do you think about her)
Ahhh… OK, I didn’t understand the end goal here… good luck!
Count with my support on that, any estimated date?