I finally got around to finishing the textures on Lilienne - though her wings are still a work in progress, I've added in the sculpted hair with normal maps from zBrush and laid out the UVs for her shoulder straps. I used the procedural cloth for the bump maps and I worked out a new trick to help myself fumbling through the creative process here. I wanted to work with colors and the bump map on her clothing, but I wanted to configuration of the cloth texture to be united between the color channel and the bump channel, but I wanted to the colors of course, to be separate. So I wired up all the connections for the attributes from the color to the bump and left the colors disconnected. Simple enough, but it was nice because it allowed me to experiment with a bunch of different options in only one place and see it's affects through IPR very quickly and never have to copy those values from one procedural map to another.

I had been advised on turning her shoulder coverings into simple nCloth shapes and solving them, then using the solved cloth as wraps on the model and I've looked at a couple other options and ended up coming back to this one in the end so that's what I've done.

I intentionally left a fairly large weave in on her shoulder pieces as they look sort of 'knitted' together. That was to help sell the illusion that she's really not that big. I'm not sure how shiny I want her clothing to be, but I'm using an anisotropic shader which is pretty soft at this point (the rim light in this scene has a very high intensity to help with the sub-surface scattering material for her skin). I can adjust for rendering if need be.

I also updated her model to fix the nose - if you look back you'll see some weird model behavior there and with the SSS material it was not looking good. This could be a good thing ... or a really bad thing. Because her Blendshapes have already been created, I can't simply use this one to wire back into the rigged mesh. I'll have to do a wrap which ...... will hopefully work. If not though, I have the original version still ... she'll just have a funky nose.

Ok, so after spending absurd amounts of time trying to figure out why Maya/MentalRay's SubSurfaceScattering material has eye-gougingly annoying caching issues, I managed to eek out these renders this morning at about 3:45 AM ... then I went to bed so I could get up and go to work. Ahhh, the life of an animation student!

I am tempted to go back in and get some finer bump details, but I really feel like I need to stop here. He's missing the finishing touches on his waist belt, but other than that the only thing I feel inclined to work on at this point is the hair. I'm planning on using a hair simulator if I can get it rendering and the dynamics working well enough. Other than that though, I'm pretty satisfied with the model and textures at this point.

I've spent more time re-working Lilienne's SSS and I'm at a bit of an impasse.

I've run some tests starting over with the shader and using a sphere as the skin object ... then just use a simple checker as the over-all color of the shader. This shows the SSS on the white parts of the checker and the black parts ... are just black. Great! But when I paint black on Lilienne ... I don't get black. Why? How do I fix it? Not sure ... still just not sure. Anyways - here's a much nicer looking skin that what I've had before.

I like how it feels softer, smoother and more ... glowy (that's a technical term). I've also got the UV sets working the way I want so I can have a higher detailed map on her face than I'll need for her arms / chest.

I'm reaching out for help with my SSS issue though, so hopefully I'll get to a point where I can resolve it soon.

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A fellow student got me thinking outside the box and that led to a discovery!!! Apparently, all the UVs were correct except for this new overall color map I added to the SSS Material - that was causing the brow shapes (the only shapes on the white map) to appear in other places - like near her elbows which of course these renders didn't show. So all I had to do was set the UV set for the overall_color map ... AND .......

I've finally begun working on the animation - this is a WIP from an early shot in the film so it is what it is ... blocking that isn't finished yet. ;)

Fortunately though, I feel like it's coming along really well, with the help of my animation advisor, Ben Kerr - you'll be hearing me praise him a great deal in the coming months.

So she's a fairy - what can you do? She's girlish and she's now got her make-up updated.

One of the things I started noticing as I was working on the textures was that her lips were pretty flimsy. For some reason, I can model a face and completely miss this kind of thing until I start really analyzing the textures and it brings out flaws in the model. The lips were pretty bad. So I've puffed them up a bit here in zBrush and built a separate blendshape just in case I need to control how fully they are.

I've also got some lashes here. There's really only one shot that'll be this close to her face and from an animation perspective - it's not terribly interesting so I really need to move on and get to the textures of her outfit and perhaps a little more skin variation as well.

It's funny how slower days at work can be used to provide for some great experimentation ... thanks in no small part to my brother - here's a concept background for LordAurasia.com ... this site WILL be getting a major face lift ... I thought I'd set the stage for it now.

I made this concept with Apophysis 2.0.2 and a couple of stock art supplies (Rabieshund Star Brushes and Kire's Nebulas)

Thanks for the kick in the right direction Bro!

I spent some time this week working on Lilienne's head again. I had a major issue with her arms, chest, neck and head all being the same object - this meant that one texture map had to cover them all and even with a 2k texture map, the face only got a small portion of that. So I decided to teach myself how to split the UVs into two sets with the help of a vimeo video. Now her face is literally 300% larger as far as textures go! If you look closely, you can see about midway down her neck where the line between the two texture maps is. This will be addressed when I re-layout the UVs for her chest / arms.

With the new resolution I used my old maps, exploded them up to the correct size and then used them as a guide to paint new textures for the eyebrows, lips, etc. This is just the first pass texture which obviously needs some work but it's my first time texturing ontop of a sub-surface-scattering material. I want to spend more time on pretty much everything, but considering all that was involved, I'm pretty happy for one night's worth of work which also included almost 3 hours of animation! YEAH!! I adjusted the colors for her eyes giving her a second 'noise' map on the outer part of the iris and changing the colors there. My grandmother (a painter) once said, "If you're only using one color in the eyes, your doing it wrong." Blunt ... but true. I feel like the base color (black) behind the iris may be a bit much for her still. Yes - she's a fairy and I wouldn't mind her looking a little 'special' - but I want her to feel alive and human too.

Although it's for a class, I have to admit, it's really nice to be able to work on my thesis project for class credit. I finished working on her upper body sub surface scattering material (SSS) and unfortunately lost a lot of the progression work due to a maya crash (YUCK). But here's what I ended up with at 2:30 in the AM.

Also - I'm working on Kion's normal maps / displacement maps in zBrush.

zBrush is such an incredible tool ... I absolutely love using it. It honest feels like it doesn't really belong in the realm of traditional computer graphics tools. It's so ... organic ... forgiving ... maelable ... it makes working on models (especially for fun) so much more light and dare I say personal. With a good stylus it feels just like digital clay.

After making my first video, I decided to post a second one about how to keep Maya's blendshapes in sync with a zTool in zBrush. The idea is that you are never tied down to one program or another. You can modify a blendshape in Maya without worrying about getting locked down in Maya. You can simply export the OBJ file, update your zTool in zBrush and continue modifying it at will.

This is what would allow you to continue working on high res scult details while still keeping your base shape in tow with Maya.

The tools are getting better and better every year for high quality digital content. I wanted to create a demo of how to mirror blendshapes using zBrush which is by far the best tool out there for organic modeling and sculpting.

Here's the mel script I used (modified) originally found here from vaniljus.