3d modelling

[ballzac]

Just trying to improve my 3d modelling skills while I actually have the time for it. This is by far my best attempt at a head/face. Obviously, it's missing some elements, like eyebrows and teeth, but I'm not sure if I'll finish this one. I made some mistakes in the actual mesh early on that I'm having trouble ironing out. I think I've learnt a lot for the next one and hopefully I can polish up the mesh a bit better earlier on before I start texturing it.

[ThunderIdeal]

poor juanita. i reckon i know you well enough to know that her mouth isn't open so that words can come out

[ballzac]

Ahahahaha

Actually I thought a slightly open mouth would make it easier for rigging later on if I want to use the character in an animation or something.

[ThunderIdeal]

i know.

that is precisely what i was inferring.

edit:

Edited November 28, 2011 by ThunderIdeal

[ballzac]

touché

[etherealdrifter]

Balls and thunder sitting in a tree

KI

SSING

[ThunderIdeal]

Ballzac and thunder

Sitting in a tree, hey wait

Hold the fucken phone!

[Xenodimensional]

nice work :-)

[ballzac]

It's far from perfect, but I think what I've managed to achieve here is not too shabby for what's probably my second or third serious attempt at a face.

Here's the same mesh, but textured using mudbox:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV9vAjKyF0k

Edited November 29, 2011 by ballzac

[btotl]

Fuck yeah man!

I've tried several times to model a head/face. my meshes are always so messy and un realistic.

Thats awesome good job! keep it up.

[ballzac]

Cheers man. I had problems in the past, but I had been using a top-down approach. This time I tried a bottom-up approach, starting by modelling the individual features and then joining them up, and it worked much better for me. The sculpting tools in mudbox are amazing and I think that would be the best way to deal with a top-down approach, but I think I'll stick with the bottom-up approach for the moment because it's working for me.

[Xenodimensional]

Check out Sculptris if you haven't done so already, it subdivides the mesh as you sculpt, which is why Pixologic who make ZBrush bought it and its developer. The fact that it's free, small and uses comparitively less resources is the metaphorical icing ;-)

Here's one I made:

 

 

[ballzac]

Awesome. Looks very similar to mudbox, but being free is always a bonus.

[ballzac]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEiilsJOcig

[ballzac]

[ballzac]

Messing about more with texturing, this time keeping it in blender. There are serious flaws, but no point in me ironing out those because I still haven't finished the mesh and will have to re-texture when I've finished the mesh. But I'm getting confident that I can produce a somewhat realistic texture for her once the mesh is finished.

[Sheather]

Looking pretty good so far. How many hours have gone into it? Looks like a pretty long piece of work, but that's alright if it's partly practice to see how good you can get. Looking forward to seeing the finished result

[ballzac]

Well I guess it's been 4 days that I've been working on it, but haven't been spending every hour on it ... maybe 15-20 solid hours so far.

[ballzac]

So I think the mesh is as finished as it's ever going to be, so I'm going to start texturing properly. I made a good start on it before I realised I hadn't unwrapped the hands properly and would be unable to texture them, so I'm going to start again.

[Sheather]

Nothing suss there haha. Good mesh, bar a couple of things. The toes look horrifying. The belly button seemed too high, but now that I think about it, it's probably accurate.

Looking forward to the final skin.

[ballzac]

Yeah, the toes are a little skinny. Most of the toe issues are simply due to the texturing though. I hadn't yet straightened out the toe texture when I realised the issue with the unwrapping of the hands.

Evidence:

...actually, I just rendered it without the uv mapping, and it's apparent that the mesh is pretty bad for the toes, thanks for pointing it out. I think they need to be improved to match the rest of the mesh. Fattening them will go a long way to fixing it. As you can see, the further foot, where you can't see the spaces between the toes because of the angle, looks much better than the near one:

A couple more angles:

[tipz]

Edit : reminded me of that song... sorry i had too

Edited December 3, 2011 by tipz

[ballzac]

Well, about six more hours of work and I think the feet are much better:

Edited December 10, 2011 by ballzac

[ballzac]

Gave her an armature and just messing around with posing her. Will go back to texturing soon.

[ballzac]

I've learnt that there is a lot of skill and work involved in texturing a human. I've spend quite a few hours over the past week trying to get the face right. I think I have most of it worked out, though there are a couple of issues I'm having with the implementation. The main thing is that I have a uv mapped image applied to the face, along with several sss shaders and a bumpmap. The problem is the way the image is blended with the sss shaders. In this picture it's about 50/50. If the image is turned up, the sss effect diminishes and vice versa. This is very evident in the eyebrows, which look very transparent. This is fine because I will get rid of the eyebrows in the image and use particles for the eyebrows, but it will matter for the lips and areolae, and also for freckles etc. At the moment, the bumpmap is not very neat, but I'm going to redo that. I'm aiming for an effect like what is seen on the nose and just above the brows, but I may tone it down slightly.

EDIT: Just updated it with a better skin tone and the bumpmap evened out a little bit.

Edited December 9, 2011 by ballzac