I’m going to have to call this body/outfit “done,” even though it’s not, if I want to finish this thing on time….which I probably won’t   Her head positioning and neck are really bothering me, so I’ll be fixing that as well as some other proportional issues, but as far as detailing out the high res goes, this is pretty much it.

My entry probably isn’t the most exciting of WIPs (especially in comparison to a lot of the other killer work being done for this competition), but I think things will come together more once I get to the texturing/lighting stage. I’m planning on relying on other things aside from a heavy normal map, but we’ll see how well that goes in the end.

The sculpt  on her hair is just temporary geometry to make it easier to build the low poly alpha hair.

Lately I’ve been struggling with the design of her instrument.  It’s pretty hard to think of a cool pose with her sitting down playing a guqin, and having her play such an instrument vertically doesn’t make any sense, so I’ve been thinking of changing it to a guzheng, or perhaps some sort of guqin/guzheng hybrid.  I suppose I should do some pose sketches and decide then.  A guzheng might also give her a stronger presence, which may fit the theme of the contest better.

This isn’t the latest iteration, but I forgot to post this the other day.  Progress is going pretty slow, but at least concept wise, I think all that’s left is to re-design her instrument to make it a little more fantastic and unique looking.  I figured I would work out all the little details when I get further along with the model (though I can see this backfiring on me in many ways).  Still a long way to go!

I wrote up a little guide for rendering Ambient Occlusion maps with XNormal for some people at work.  Ambient Occlusion requires a lot of settings to tweak, and after a lot of experimentation and searching around the web, I figured I’d share my workflow for setting up my diffuse textures.

Tutorial link here

I hope this proves useful to some people struggling with rendering AO maps.  Oddly enough, I usually get nicer results with my real work, but this at least demonstrates what the settings do

For those who haven’t tried it yet, XNormal is a great program that generates different kinds of maps (quickly and easily) for game model creation.  I highly recommend it

XNormal link

One of the recent issues of ImagineFX had a few sample images from Ballistic’s Ultimate photo reference series. Figured I might as well put it to good use!

Link

I like the idea behind the photo reference series, but now that I actually have some samples, it’s hard for me to want to buy any of the dvds.  More care could have been put not only in taking the pictures, but also post processing (like making sure zero-pose photos are all level with each other). At the moment, the price seems a little high for the current quality. I hope the series improves from here on out!

Hmmm…now that I actually looked at the product link, I wish I had done so earlier. There are a few photos available that would have made good reference. Oh well!

This time I wanted to try and sculpt a head from a sphere, which has some advantages and disadvantages over Mudbox’s head primitive. I think from now on I’ll start making my own base meshes. Not entirely satisfied with the way I resolved her hair (among other things), but I don’t want to think about this any more since Dominance War starts soon.

I really did not like the direction that last head was going, so I decided to putz around with something different.

Loosely based on some Bridgman drawings.

Tried to do a younger head this time.  Ugh….I’ll come back to this some other time

So I said I was tired of working on this. Well, I am

Another level of subdivision kills my computer. Convenient!

Neck’s still weird, but I don’t feel like working on this guy any more

Head WIP starting from the head primitive in Mudbox (I don’t think I’ll ever use it again:P) I really didn’t intend to sculpt an older looking face, but it kinda kept going in that direction, so I went with it. Still very WIP!

Weird neck anatomy…must fix many things..

I’m not terribly comfortable with my knowledge of anatomy, so I’ve been messing around with some anatomy stuff in Mudbox.

I used the base mesh provided in the ongoing Mudbox contest for this:

I didn’t go too much higher in mesh resolution as I don’t think I defined the masses very well.

Focusing on the torso:

I have a long way to go