Link Project 008

I have now finished most textures for link. All I have left for textures is to create specular/reflection maps and tweak shaders. Here is my latest render.

Still might tweak the saturation of the boots and the clothing isn't final. Just thought I would add some color to the low res meshes. Also not sure if I will leave the hair one solid color or paint a texture for it. I feel like leaving it solid fits the style. What do you think?

Now that I have pretty much finished the textures I can now go back and finish up the rig. Once the rig is complete I can start testing simulations. 

Not that big of an update, would like to have worked more on Link but some things came up this week. For example, my website is currently down and I had to create a temporary one. If you want to check it out here is the link:

http://jesusmundo.weebly.com/

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.

Link Project 006

So at this point, I believe I started creating the hair. I originally planned to simulate hair using Maya's hair system. I tried creating the hair in Zbrush but I couldn't get the volume that I wanted the hair to have. Instead I ended up creating curves in Maya that I would use to create the hair. This was a very long and tedious task and to be honest, it drained my enthusiasm for the project.
So I decided to take a "quick" break from it so I wouldn't get burned out. I thought I could quickly create a SSS (sub-surface scattering) piece (my female portrait project) and put it on my reel. Turned out that the piece took a lot longer than expected. But I think it was for the better. I learned a lot while working on it and it also got me motivated again. With that project finished I came back to this one and made some corrections to my model.
Some of the advice I got from my friend for the clothing was to create a single low poly mesh to base my simulation off of. With that in mind, my problem areas were the belt area and the pants. The belt area would be hard to simulate if I was using one mesh for the tunic so I decided to split it in half.
I also originally had the pants as a separate mesh to simulate over Link's legs. His "pants" are actually tights, so there was no point in simulating them, instead I could just use them as his legs. So I removed Link's legs and merged his pants as his legs. 
Lastly I also decided that the realistic simulated hair wasn't fitting the stylized look. Especially since he didn't have realistic eyebrows. So I refined the block in hair mesh that I made and decided to use that. So far the hair has been very troublesome but I'm getting closer to a result I'm happy with.
For now, here are some progress images.

That's about all for now. I do have one more thing I will be uploading later due to my internet being rather poor lately. This post is pretty close to my current progress. By my next post I should be all caught up.

Until then, thank you for reading and I hope you look forward to my next post.

Female Portrait 011

Once I finished the hair, I did some minor tweaks on the skin and set everything up for rendering. Here are some different views of the final render at half quality.

And here is a screen grab of my flow in Fusion. It's not anything fancy but I figured I would show it.

And finally, the final render.

I am happy with the final result. No it's not perfect, and no it's not anywhere near the level I want to be at but it's a start. I learned a lot working on this project and I think it's time I call it finished. There are a lot of things I could nit pick but if I did that I would never finish. I now know that I gotta keep working hard so I can become better and faster. I'm sure one day I will look back on this and think how bad it looks just like I did with my first attempt. But, that is all part of learning and progressing.

I still plan on doing a turnaround with different IBL's but that will take some time since I only have my one work machine. Once I finish that I will add it to my demo reel and possibly create a quick post with it.

Thank you for reading my post and seeing my progress through this project. Since this is done, I plan on going back to a live action project that I was working on previously. Till then, I hope you look forward till the next post.

Female Portrait 010

Alright, well it's been a few days since my last post but I can now say that I am finished. There are a few things that I still want to do but for the most part it is done.

So for the past couple days I have been trying to get the hair coloring to feel correct according to my reference. It wasn't as easy as I was hoping it was gonna be. From the start I knew there was no real way to paint the texture for the hair since it has no UV's. But, I had did some test on my first iteration that gave me some ideas on how to achieve my goal.

What I ended up doing was splitting the hair into sections. I ended up with eight sections. Each section had a ramp texture plugged into the diffuse, secondary specular, and transmission of the V-Ray hair material. The only part that I had a problem with was the back of the hair. I had the look I wanted but I needed it to go the opposite direction.

I did a lot of testing to see if I could get it to go the right direction. I figured out that it was receiving it's information from a V-Ray hair sampler node. The attribute it was using was the distance along strand. Below you can see the nodes in Maya's hypershade.

After trying for a while I decided I needed help. I sought out help from my friends but they weren't sure how to solve the problem either. In the end I decided it was a lost cause and I needed to find another method to achieve what I wanted.

I ended up using the different hair sections that I created to my advantage. I selected specific hair clumps that I wanted to change the color of and assigned them to other hair systems. Doing so, changed the color information to the other hair section I assigned it to. After some time I achieved a look that I was happy with.

I will end this post here just to keep it short. I am posting the final render right after I finish this post though. 

Thanks for reading.

Female Portrait 009

OK, we are on the final stretch. This is my most recent render.

I still haven't tried new camera angles and there are still a few things I want to do with the hair but overall I think this is the final look I am going with.

I adjusted the lighting setup to be more like studio lighting. Here is my setup.

The next few things I plan on doing is adding a gradient to the hair so she can have dark roots like my reference. I also want to do some slight tweaking to some strands of hair. After that I will be doing some renders with different HDRI's (High Dynamic Range Images) and see what my result is. My end goal is to be able to render a full turnaround with different IBL's (Image Based Lighting). That might be a tall order considering I only have one machine to render with but I will do my best.

Anyway, please don't hesitate to comment and critique. Since I am nearing the final render I would really like to hear some feedback. You don't need an account to leave a comment, just select anonymous and it should go through.

Thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.