Light Penatrates the skin

So, this update is subtle but is going to help me with other stuff. I was working with some different lighting schemes for different angles and more dramatic type lighting, but the way the skin was absorbing the light I didn't really like it.



If you look under the nose of Ed here you'll see that the shadow is a lot more darker now, which is actually correct since I don't have any lights hitting that spot so it should be pretty dark. His eye area and surface detail are also now getting blown out as much. I also added some other maps to the shader to control the light and bring up the detail some. This is my first skin shader that is not a blinn with 3 maps for a video game so I'm learning as I go :).

Talk about a hairy situation...

So I had a good weekend, my little girl came down for a visit on Friday for the weekend, always a good time when the brat is about it :).

Talk about a hairy situation. So this girls hair I'm finding waaaay tougher than Olmos's hair. Right now I'm using maya hair to do this and it's giving me mixed results all over the place. Basically I set up a simulation to get the hair falling on the head right, but some curves are fighting me tooth and nail, like the bludge on the left side of her head (camera right). The top of her right side is also bulging up too much it should be flatter.

The bottom of her hair I haven't really worked on yet, it's going to require a new simulation as thickness and color that's required I can't really get with one Maya hair setup.


I'm finding it hard to find a good tutorial on making hair, I watched one by digital tutors but it was more about using dynamics and not actually creating nice hair. The 10ish minute example on creating a actual head of hair for a model was poorly done and did not look good at all (the picture of the redhead on the web page isn't in the video). That being said it did have some new ideas in it, and I did learn somethings just not what I really wanted to learn, if you have a library around sign it out.

So in short still lots of work to do on the hair... Never liked hair really, takes me months to get a hair cut.

Well Momma didn't raise no hair dresser...

So did some revisions to the girl head and started a different approach on hair. Basically I started with nurbs planes and sculpted out hair cards, then I extracted the curves and populated the entire head with hair. This method was a lot faster than Ed's hair where I had individually placed each hair clumb and then shaped the key strands.

However will this be a better technique? Right now this image is just a straight up raw extraction from the planes, and we see two things;


1. The hair needs a lot of work and
2. I am noooooo hairdresser.

I will play with dynamics and see if I can get the hair to settle on the head and fall along her neck better, if that doesn't work, well... I'm in for a heap of work.

Again this is a WIP (Work in Progress) Image and in no way represents the final head and hair.

Adding Insignias

Added texture to the uniform, his shoulders I'm not quite getting the feel of the fabric yet. My maya file corrupted and I lost some work :(, but I had a back up so... I just had to redo some stuff.

I can't find a clear enough image of the insignias on his collar there, it has some design in it, so if anyone is in to that kind of stuff (I promise I won't call you a fan boy) and could point me in the direction for some good reference please give me a shout (there is a wiki for all the patches and stuff, but it didn't cover his collar). And the buttons were lost in the crash, I'll have to remake those.

Lighting it up

Uniform model has been added, but not textured yet! So please no freak outs on the colors and the shader of his uniform (I haven't even laid out the UVs yet). Also it's a little snug around the neck so Going to shape that out a tad bit, shoulders are also curving off too much but that's an easy fix.

So working on lighting the face, 4 lights right now and render times are up to 15 minutes a frame, I took one of the lenses out of his glasses (back lense) but think I may throw that back in, I liked the reflection of the light reflectors in it. And I think I may throw in another light reflector in front of him to give his eyes more life.

Anyone have any thoughts on the specularity of his face? To specy?

For the fan boys

Alrighty made one quick adjustment for the Adama fan boys before I could get called out on it :). What was the change? Only a fan boy would know :P.

Looks like I have to watch the lighting, the wrong angle totally kills his pock marks.

And I put on the glasses...

Due to popular demand, the glasses are on, begging the question, "Is the uniform to follow?". I enlarged his pupils after looking at photos he has less white space in the eyes as I had. Brought in the sides of the head a tad to fill up the hairline. Oh and added crappy eyebrows, ya... I'm gonna have to redo those, Maya fur just isn't working for me at this point. He could most likely benefit from a eccentricty map and a specular reflection map as well.

But he's getting close to finish, oh and i should fix up his lighting it's flat right now, had it this way to help me work on hair.


Okay, so did another quick render didn't work out so I combined it with the on up top to fake some sort of eye highlight, and brought the saturation down. Looks like the light is penetrating to far into his skin along the shoulder so I'll have to dial back the light, or change up the subsurface scattering map.

Shave and Hair Cut....

Yup, hair sure is tedious, takes awhile to render too, tho my settings are a little high. So have the hair plugs in (most of ehm), and now I just have to shape the hair line add body to where it's needed etc. It needs a lot more work.

His chest texture is going to remained smudged until I can find a good head/neck texture somewhere, if you have one please MSN me :). I think I need to revisit his forhead wrinkles they look to thick to me. That will be in the polish stage. I would like to have the hair done tomorrow with the eyebrows under way.

State of Ed

Adjusted the skin tone and lighting, adjusted some modeling, fixed a problem with the spec map pointing to the wrong spot.

Not a 2am - 3am Post

Man I post a lot late a night, any who this is where my head is at...


Will start on the hair soon, gonna switch back to Edward and fix his hair up, and give him eyebrows. I don't know any artist who likes doing hair, tedious and hard :p.

Overall she's coming along, I think I could stand to make her mouth a little smaller, and up around her eyelashes it's kinda smudgy.