I wish I could show this new character I’m working on, but alas, it will have to wait!

Here are some viewport grabs:

If you ask how long the hair took to make, I’d probably answer “FOREVER!!!” and I wouldn’t be lying by much. Yep, it’s built card by card, and the polycount is over 20k triangles; it is pretty low poly hair, kind of like in-game hair I’ve built for some of the games I worked on, but with way more cards. The hairstyle still needs some tuning and tweaking, both in terms of geometry and shading. It will get tessellated at rendertime with mental ray’s subD approximation so it will look smooth in final render. One thing that bugs me and I haven’t found the solution for it yet (but anyone reading this who might know the trick please let me know!) – when I render raytrace shadows with mental ray, regardless of method (simple, sorted or segments) I will always get fully transparent areas of cards to drop faint shadow, and I’d much more prefer if they would drop no shadow at all. This can be fixed in post and isn’t even noticeable when cast onto an object with SSS material that will disperse the edge of alpha cards – and of course soft shadows would totally take care of it – but the second render in this post (rendered originally in only 512 pixels square!) took over half an hour to complete because casting soft raytrace shadows through shitload of alpha cards takes forever. And I couldn’t even get depth map shadows to show up, let alone cast properly through alpha cards.

Yves is still awaiting to get her clothes, but dry-cleaning was closed this weekend, so perhaps one day…

To commemorate this jubilee post, Yves is now getting some company in form of a space policeman, who went mainstream last week and now hangs out on YouTube:

Here’s the render (which is by no means final, in fact, it is QUITE unfinished):

When they heard there’s some party and celebration going on FogLog, these guys here, especially the drunk lady and lovebug, decided it would be unforgivable if I were to leave them out, so here they come:

конец!

The last piece was done as a paintover of zBrush sculpt, with some photographic sources added in, and lots of tonal adjustments and reshaping. The sketch next to it was a study from a still, and the first two sheets are just sketchbook pages, some were done with reference, some without.

I thought it was interesting to see how it all came to this, so I loaded my WIP files one by one and snapped the image of each, and then arranged them chronologically into this little movie:

It all started from zSpheres as one piece, then down the road I resurfaced it and chopped it up intu multiple meshes, and also added more pieces, such as epaulets and belts. The model went through a lot of proportion changes, and from cartoony to realistic. Medium low res models are then assembled in Maya, and the detail is brought back with displacement map. Some test renders should pop in here soonish.

This second head also comes with a timelapse of its creation, here’s YouTube flick:

Head sculpting timelapse

There is more in the works, but at present it is not in quite presentable state, as I am still in the process of learning to do proper software redering, but some screenies are due to pop up on this page… soonish, I hope.

More is to come and I’m pretty glad I’m back to doing some 3D in my spare time. Surprisingly, I don’t get tired of it after 40+ hours of doing it at work. It feels good to have all the resolution I want to make a good render and don’t have to watch my textures get crunched down to 256².

For the curious: this is my interpretation of Sam, from Sam and Twitch comic book. I have been working on this fella in the past several weeks in ZBrush, Silo and a little bit of Maya. I haven’t used any reference explicitly, but I looked at Ashley Wood’s amazing covers and comic book pages by Angel Medina for ideas and inspiration. I’ve built the low poly mesh, and I hope to UV it and bake textures hopefully sometime next week. Then off I go to start working on Twitch.