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.

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.

Female Portrait 006

Now that I had the look I was trying to achieve all I needed to do was finish the texturing and tweak the SSS material. 
I did most of the texturing in Mudbox and then transferred everything over to Photoshop to make the maps more manageable. I painted the freckles in Photoshop just because I have a brush that makes it easier as well as look nicer. I also painted a gloss map, a dry skin map, and a map for the makeup. After some tweaking this is what I settled on.

The one thing I am going to keep adjusting is the makeup. Other than that I think it looks fine. I could be wrong though, so please let me know what you think. 

And so that's pretty much where I am right now. I am currently working on all the hair and I hope to get it done soon. Since my blog is pretty much caught up to where I am, I won't be posting as often. From here on it will be little tweaks here and there, which isn't as exciting to see. I am hoping to post every other day but we will see how it goes. And remember, any comment is valuable. So please if you think something looks weird or you think the skin looks good let me know. I look at this so much that sometimes my view of it can be clouded. Remember I thought that first sculpt looked good at one point, boy was I wrong.

Once again thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.

Female Portrait 005

The skin pore detail is one of the subtle details that can really sell your work. In the beginning I was just using Zbrush's noise maker to get an overall pore detail. After watching Frank Tzeng's tutorial I learned that that was the old way of doing pores. Unfortunately I wasn't able to do the pores the same way he did since he advises buying some alphas (black and white images that you can use to create detail) and I didn't have the money for them. So I just made do with the ones that he provides.It could be better, but I don't think it looks too bad. 

One thing that I am still having trouble with is getting high detail on a mesh without subdividing it too much. For example on Frank Tzeng's sculpt he was able to get very fine detail but his mesh only had 3 million points. When I tried the same thing I got to 4 million points yet wasn't able to get the same amount of detail. If you have any advice on this I would love to hear it. Anyway, this is what my sculpt detail looks like.

Since I had now finished the sculpt I needed to brush up on creating a SSS (sub-surface scattering) material. The tutorial I watched was "Realistic Skin Shading, Lighting and Rendering in 3ds Max and V-Ray" by Adam Lewis on Digital Tutors (a website with lots of different tutorials to say the least). Now, I am using Maya not 3ds Max but it was still a great tutorial. One thing he stressed was that in order to have believable skin you need a good texture map. 

I am using Autodesk Mudbox to texture the mesh. I still haven't gotten completely used to texturing in Mudbox so it was kinda hard for me to create a good skin map. This was my first rough pass which was definitely not cutting it. 

I ended up finding another tutorial on Digital Tutors ("Painting a Realistic Skin Map" by Cory Cosper) that went over texturing in Zbrush. After I watched that I took one of the images I had and projected it onto the mesh. I was only able to use a small portion of the projection and just pulled colors from it to paint the rest of the mesh. This was the result.

That's it for today, thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.

Female Portrait 003

Starting the new sculpt, I decided to use Zbrush's spotlight tool. The spotlight tool allows you to reference an image onto your document (screen space) and you can use it to project a texture onto your model. I found that it is also good for referencing images. So, I used the images that I had gotten before and started tweaking the sculpt to match the proportions.
Once I moved everything into place I looked at the model and thought that it looked completely off. So I got it to a point and started sculpting again. Still referencing only the three or four images I had. Once I got it to where I thought it looked similar I again completed the process of moving it over to Maya. This was the result.

Once rendered I started doing small tweaks again. I noticed the nose was incorrect and needed to be fixed. So I ended up with this.

I thought it looked decent enough but I still wasn't getting the detail that I wanted for the skin bump. Originally I used both a normal map (a map that gives the mesh information in order to fake lighting of bumps and dents but does not displace the surface) and a displacement map (a map that displaces the surface for bump and dent detail). But the displacement wasn't giving me what I wanted (because I did it wrong) so I got rid of it and only used a normal map. Because the normal map was barely visible I bumped it up to a value of 2 instead of 1.

A friend had asked previously if I was using a 32 bit image for the displacement but I was using a 16 bit image because that is what Zbrush gave me by default. So I looked into creating a 32 bit image for displacement in Zbrush and found out how to do it. Once I applied it to my mesh I realized my mistake of bumping up the normal map. So I set it back to a value of one to correct it.

Normal Map (Value=2) + Displacement

Normal Map (Value=1) + Displacement

This is when I kinda hit a wall and decided that I wasn't really getting anywhere. The sculpt still wasn't very similar to the model and it just wasn't up to par with what I wanted. So I decided I need to study more and watch some tutorials.

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

Female Portrait 002

So I forgot to give a little back story on how I chose the person to base my reference off of, so I will give a short one. I came across a wallpaper and decided I wanted to do a portrait. This is the wallpaper.

That's how I ended up with that first sculpt. This is the only reference I used when creating the first one. Which now I know you need a lot more than one photo if you are trying to do a likeness sculpt. 

So when I started re-sculpting I just went for it. I found out who the model was and got two more images of her to use (I thought it was enough I guess, but clearly I was wrong). So I just started sculpting from looking at the images and trying to do it all by eye. After I finished the sculpture I created hair using fibermesh (Zbrush's hair system), that way I could later export the hair to be rendered in another software. Once that was done, I retopoed (created a structure for the 3D mesh made from points connected by edges to form the mesh) the mesh and imported it into Maya (another 3D software used for multiple things). I then used V-Ray (a rendering engine) to create the texture for the skin and the hair. This was the result.

At the time I thought it looked pretty decent. So I posted it on Facebook to get some feedback from friends. They all gave me amazing feedback and I immediately began making the corrections. When I started doing that I realized, that my sculpt didn't actually look anything like the model. Plus my proportions were completely wrong and my skin texture needed a lot of work. So I ended up having to go all the way back to the beginning and start over.

Ok, so that's it for this post but I just wanted to mention that if you have any questions feel free to ask. Whether it be that you don't understand something or you want a more in depth description of how I did something, I would be happy to tell you.

Once again thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next post.

Female Portrait 001

I started using Zbrush (a 3D sculpting software) a while ago. I think sometime back in 2012. I immediately fell in love with the software. So I sculpted a female portrait and posted images of it on Facebook in February of 2013.

 

Afterward I continued developing my skills and working on projects. After I graduated I did a small traditional sculpture self portrait and posted pictures of it on Facebook. That was when I came across the image of my old sculpture. I immediately thought, "Wow, that looks terrible compared to what I can do now." I also thought that it being there reflects badly on my skill level. So I decided that I would redo the sculpt and show just how much I have improved. I also thought it would be a good opportunity to add it to both my modeling and lighting demo reel.

And so I began a journey that I thought was just going to be really quick. Turns out I still had a lot to learn. 

I want you all to be able to see my process. So I will be starting from the very beginning and continually creating post where I talk about what I have done and what I was thinking at the time. Once I get caught up to where I actually am then the critiques will be really helpful. I will also try to keep these post short so you don't have to read an entire book every time I create a post. Not sure on the schedule I am going to keep for posting things, but I will try to keep one. Just drop by once and a while and hopefully it will be updated. Or you can subscribe to my post via the gadget to the right where it says "Follow by Email".

Thanks for reading and look forward to the next update.