FogLog

That’s right – the new tools, like GoZ and 3D Coat’s auto retopology are a real time savers, so I was able to create this little portrait from scratch over the weekend. I can write more about the process if anyone’s interested, just drop me a line. I am quite excited about this, because traditionally the process to create a fully lit and rendered character was really laborious and took forever, and now a lot of the gesture of original idea can be carried through to the final image because I can get there so much faster (GoZ) and I realized that topology doesn’t really matter in illustration, so the only reason I resurfaced the jacket was because I wanted to try out new 3D-Coat’s autoretopology feature, and also have the edgeloops run between sleeves and chest, so that I can add texture in Photoshop. So here it is – I call him Mustache Man, for lack of better name:

As it was undoubtedly about the damn time to start some kind of actual project, the timing was perfect to discover the 3D character challenge at CGHub and so I decided to give it a shot. The theme is bounty hunter, and even though one month doesn’t seem like enough time to do fully textured, posed and lit character, I thought there is a chance to still come up with something that I can continue working on and finish it off as polished illustration.

<rant>I’m having trouble finding challenges that don’t call for fighter type characters, which I’m not really interested in. Maybe being a woman has something to do with it. Oh, and a peace frog! Make love, not war, people! And “put those guns down, boys” – says DJ Horace “the Pacifist” Walsh on K-Jah radio in GTA3 :) But alas, all I’ve been seeing is characters with weapons. Because you simply can’t kill anyone with poison, by throwing him out of the window, or any more sophisticated method that would also require some thought put into it, e.g. do it so that not even detectives Goran and Eames can ever find you. Forget about about smart characters – all we need is guns, boobs, and long legs, because if you make character with realistic proportions, people will comment that it looks too chubby, or that the legs are way too short. Sigh… </rant>

Anyways… here’s the brief:

Background
After doing some thinking and brainstorming, I picked to do a female character. Her code name is Yves. She had an extensive espionage training with some secret government agency, so she knows the ins and outs of getting the information she needs to find the fugitives. After managing to escape the agency and lose her trail, she arrived at the capital and decided to do bounty hunting until she has enough money to join the elite circles and that way gain influence in society, which would in turn help her push her own agenda. She is very smart and confident, and knows how much she is worth. People that know her well don’t believe she is completely human. Some kind of wicked perfection, one of her friends said. She is also versed with various assassination techniques which were part of her training, but her priority in this bounty hunting gig is to blend in with the crowd and keep low profile, while making sure her occupation remains a secret, and it’s not her thing to go around killing people that are on her way, as that would raise suspicion and make her the kind of fugitive she is hunting for big bucks.

Being a very attractive woman, she uses her looks to seduce men and women alike to get information she needs. She also has a partner who is just a behind the scenes hacker guy that hooks up to the surveillance cameras throughout the city and guides her to avoid danger. She has a brain implant that hooks her directly to the net, and also her eyes are like cameras that send video feed to her partner to help him help her with guidance.

Visuals
I wanted to have a mix of masculine and feminine facial features; masculine to show a hint of brutality and feminine to make her seductive. She really has no remorse, but that’s not to say that she lacks emotions entirely. These days she’s trying to blend in with hipster crowd, because she found out that one of the gangs that hangs out at Rock’n'Shock bar might be sheltering a very valuable fugitive. She knows just the way to get to them.

Inspritation / Reference
Here’s the reference and inspiration sheet I’ve put together:

I’ve started with a female base model I’ve made some time ago, which is up for grabs in downloads section.

And here are the WIPs:

Hurray for a productive weekend ahead!

Thought I should post another render, a bit more fresh, in fact so fresh that it still smells like rendering fumes. But that’s okay, now that I finally had an upgrade from dual to quad core Intel processor, and the chick from the previous post was used as a benchmark: with dual, it took 87s to render and with quad almost half as much, only 47 seconds. Because of this boost in rendering speed, I decided to have some fun with mental ray this weekend. For the following render I used as a guide Ryan Kingslien’s tutorial from Gnomon Workshop titled Creating a Photo-Realistic Render in Mental Ray. The sculpt is very rough and I did some more work on it last night, so there should be updated render before May runs out completely.

I created this female head few months back, and I’ve been meaning to post this, but kept wanting to do more with the final image. So let’s just call it WIP in hope that one day this lady will have some hair. I’ve recorded the process of box modeling in series of snapshots and then did some SSS render tests in Maya, using mental ray. I’m not quite satisfied with the look and feel of the skin, hence some more fiddling with texture and material settings will have to happen. Anyhow, here she is:

Here’s another render, color corrected: