Now, I’ve never been very good at lighting and materials, so my question is this:
The arms and face use the same material. The arms appear much like I want, but the face is a bit, well, rounder. What I would like to do is flatten the shading somewhat. Also, I’m going to use Wu’s texture technique for the eyes and mouth (so what you see of the head is all there will be --excepting hair, of course…) I’ve tried playing with ramps a bit but the result isn’t quite the wash I want --and flat shaded is boring.
This is of course just a start (I still need to do that pink hair, and paste the eyes and mouth on, but I’m stuck on shading).
I love it! Though, I may be a little bias towards the subject matter.
I’ve never had anyone actually become inspired by something I made before, this is a great honor! Anyone who wants to could likewise model any of the drawings shown in my Quickly Colorized Drawings Thread.
Thanks all for the encouragement, but if that’s all I wanted I’d finish first and post in the Finished Projects. Despite my post count, about all I can do really well is model, rig, and animate. I’m honestly very bad at lighting and texturing. Please help.
I figured I’d move on to the Princess Leia buns but after an hour of dinking around with curve guides I can’t figure out how to get the particle strands to do that. If there’s anyone who knows how to do that I’d appreciate it. (I can’t seem to separate related curve guide-emitter pairs from affecting other emissions either, but it seems like I ought to be able to… Am I missing something obvious?)
If no-one else can help, I’ll hack up a lighting/shader something-something tomorrow, cause I do have a few ideas. As it is, though, I’m very tired and it’s midnight, so I’d be pretty useless.
EDIT: As you can probably guess, I’m going to bed. /:]
EDIT 2: Oh, and I totally know where you’re coming from. Man, sometimes you wish people would give you something more than ‘i liek teh pic’, eh? Some kind of improvements or fixes or tips or something. Still though, what can you do?
Wow thanks! I’ll definitely check that tutorial out --that’s exactly what I’m going for.
(But will the use of ray trace lighting bother the hair lighting?)
As you can see, there is still a disturbing artifact glaring off of the head. I’m using AO and the only lamp in the scene has the no specular button pressed. All other material settings are below. (I followed the tutorial and other than turning on AO my skin material and shader setup was already fairly close to the birthday girl’s.)
I’m also not too happy with the furry cuff of the dress. I’ve currently got a fairly high emit strand shader on it, but I can’t seem to get rid of the darker spots without getting the same effect as pressing the shadeless button… Fooey.
I have always planned to post the blend when I’m done. If someone thinks they can help me better with the lighting/material I can post the current/unfinished.
Reduced, yes. Noticeably managed, no.
Perhaps I’ll try moving it really far away and turning on the spherical falloff, or changing to a sun lamp or something…
Well, this is about all the time I have to work on this. I gave up trying to get the particles to do what I want for the hair, so I just slapped on some simple shapes and textures…
The whole thing still needs a few tweaks here and there. I can’t spend any more time learning the latest Blender (I’ve been using 2.37a for a while --yeah, dark age stuff now I know) since school resumes for me tomorrow.
Hope you all enjoy. If you can fix anything particularly egregious please either post your fix or pm me so I can post it.
Looks good! You did the hair very similar to what I did. I should post an update – maybe tomorrow I will. After the first day of work I slowed down a lot. You definitely beat me to completion, but you had a little bit of a head start.
I downloaded the blend file. You know a lot more about rigging than I do. I’ve seen people’s skeletal rigs before, but they always seem to confuse me. I need to learn more about constraints. One of these days I’ll need to go read a tutorial about rigging and animating a character. :rolleyes:
The armature is very simple actually. Just a couple notes for those of you studying it:
No elbows or knees.
This is a cartoon character, so the arms and legs are designed to bend in big curves. There is no elbow or wrist to speak of.
Select the armature and go into pose mode (Shift+Tab). Unhide hidden bones (Alt+H). You will see four bones along the length of the limb, with the second IK constrained to the elbow or knee, and the fourth IK constrained to the hand or foot.
The way the limbs are weight painted matter also: Select the body mesh and go into weight paint mode (Shift+Tab). Turn on wire and select the different groups (eg: Leg.1.L, Leg.2.L, Leg.3.L, …) to see how the weights overlap a bit to create the curve. The arms are a tad more interesting because I modeled them with a different number of segments than the number of bones in the arm. If you compare the weight colors to the armature you can see that it is calculated to make everything bend smoothly.
When to use IK
The arms and legs are rigged perfectly straight, but in practice should never be positioned that way. This is because IK will “jump” or “snap” the chain when nearing perfect straightness. This isn’t a problem with the cartoony limbs, but for a spine it is a very bad idea. Hence the spine is pure FK. For more complex characters I will usually add some action constraints to bend the spine. Search the forum for “Action Constraints Tutorial Made Easy” for my tutorial.
The antennas bounce
The antennas are also IK chains, but modeled in a bent form. The tip of the chain is targeted at an empty (using a Copy Location constraint) which is parented to the head bone. If you select one of the empties and press F7 for the object buttons, in the Anim settings you will see that I have pressed SlowParent and added a time offset of five frames (this might actually be a little long…) This will give the appearance of springy antennas as long as it is not overused and the head never stops suddenly.
If you really want to animate
then you’ll also need to individually select the Root, Hand.L, Hand.R, Foot.L, and Foot.R bones and in the IPO curve editor select “pose” from the drop-down box, then select Curve -> Interpolation Mode -> Linear from the menu. That will prevent them from sliding around when animating. Depending on your experience/preference, you may want to add some other bones in there or adjust a few other things a bit.
Yes, that was a consideration I had at the very beginning. See Waffler’s thread for the reasons I went with the textured eyes and mouth.
Modeled eyes and mouth are a bit easier to animate in terms of bones/shape keys/etc.
Textured eyes require an animated texture (an AVI) as the image channel (a la Wu, if you’ve seen some of his old animations).
My goal was only the static image, so I just cut-and-pasted those features right off of Waffler’s original pink girl image.
If you wish to animate, you’ll have to unrotate (-20, I think) and center the mouth empty on layer 3, and swap the textures attached to the head for some appropriate movies.
