Character progress

It's been over a month since I actually posted about my character project. I've been extremely busy with school and other things but I've managed to make steady progress with the piece nonetheless.

Having finished the character modeling earlier this month I started painting the diffuse textures. I used actual skin textures and images by using the projection painting technique inside Blender. Note that the texture is quite saturated because my lighting/shader setup washes away most of the color.

Texture painting in Blender

Here's a high resolution test render of the skin shader. The setup was nearly done at this point and I had already started playing around with eyebrows/eyelashes. Notice the spooky placeholder eyes in the image, hah.

Skin shading test

After that I had to create hair for the character. It consists of multiple particle systems so they all required countless hours of tweaking. There's individual elements for top and bottom eyelashes, eyebrows and two different "layers" for hair. To get the curly effect of the hair I had to comb individual guide hairs and then use simple child particles to fill out the rest of the scalp. The result turned out pretty nice and I think the hair looks good in my tests.

Hair editing

Once I had the basic character done I started to mess with my lighting setup. I studied lots of 20s/pinup photography and aimed for contrasted imagery with strong backlighting. I was amazed by my test results partly because I used actual film emulation inside Blender. The images suddenly started to look much more cinematic and well, insanely cool in my opinion.

Lighting test with internal film emulation

I used rigify to quickly pose the character and started playing with poses and different expressions. What I did notice was that the character seems a bit generic at the moment. For example the jewelry is barely visible right now and I would like it to be much more striking in the final image. The dress is very simple and I have to make something better from scratch. I also started modeling props for the scene. There's more elements than the simple accent table that I'm planning to make. A draped curtain and an old vintage telephone possibly?

The image in its current form. More work needs to be put on composition and lighting.

I hope to finish this project sometime soon now that I have more time to focus on it. I have some insanely cool and exciting things awaiting once the spring/summer kicks off. In preparations for that I'm going to learn a bit of Modo and maybe Fusion/After Effects.

Sketchup experience

I had the chance to do a minor study course focusing on Construction Drawing at Aalto University's department of Film, Television and Scenography this week. It was the second part of the course and it focused on virtual set design using Sketchup while the first week was mainly about doing technical drawings by hand which I also attended. I've never really used Sketchup so it was interesting to give it a shot finally. While simple to use I think Sketchup has some pretty handy features: The Push/Pull workflow is really intuitive and I like the extensive use of keyboard shortcuts. But then again for example the lack of bezier curves makes it good for drawing pretty much architectural shapes only. However, it was fun and I learned a lot. We used an extension called Layout for Sketchup which allows you to export 3D scenes into various 2D layouts. Here's my final layout presentation:

We had sketched our own inital set design ideas that we then translated to Sketchup. I put a lot of effort into my work and was pretty satisfied with it overall. It was also fun to play around with animating the scene.

I made different setups inside Skethup with section planes that cut the entire model in half based on an axis. The final animation was made by interpolating between these views.

Anyway, here's the finished piece:

Until next time.