More hair, and Robot forms

Continuing my cloth/hair idea by using painted textures with transparency (alpha) to allow a more layered look

Bump mapping is a little strong, and I removed the black outlines on the eyes

Looks much better with lowered bump mapping and without the manga-style eye outlines. I've also played with the specular levels to give a less shiny look to her skin

So Lucy is coming along well. I have two more targets for the model before I will consider it completed: A mouth for lip-syncing and eyelids - both of which are not simple additions and will require me to drop back down to my low-poly original


My robot (Which I like to call Blunderbus) Is being modelled in a different way from Lucy, who was built using image planes in the more standard way. Blunderbus has been build as separate pieces, using Maya as more of a 3d sketchbook than with Lucy. Work on him has, of course, been slower - but I feel I am learning to be far more comfortable in Maya's interface by working in this way.

The robot has been developing more organically than other models I have worked on. This render shows the smoothed High poly version, which has been placed together for completeness. There is still low poly originals of all parts to be welded together properly before final assembly and smoothing.

Hair continued

Maya's hair and fur functions are hugely complex and processor intensive for rendering so I've been looking at other ways to create hair. While modelling a rigid model of the hair shape I hit on the idea of using cloth with a hair texture and allowing it to settle around the head, which would also look better in motion, rather than being a solid mass stuck to the characters head.

My original test, just to see if it could work

Moving vertexes to create hair spikes and applying a simple white test texture

 

I'm going to create a couple of materials in photoshop to test this idea further, but this seems to sit nicely between mega detail and resource friendly.

3d progress

Early work on my Lucy character, testing out Maya's hair functions

And it's collider nCloth functions

and a basic model of my robot for testing lighting and materials (mostly chrome and other metals)

Using mental ray rendering to create realistic reflections