CRToonMike
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Posts posted by CRToonMike
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Here's the latest version of Saturn Girl. Fixed a buncha splines and moved around some 5-pt patches, yadda yadda yadda.
Quite happy with how it looks now. As you can tell the hair is being worked on. Not using the hair ablility of A:M, just creating a shape and will muck about with the shaders/material to get the look I want.
Next, along wth the hair, is to play around with the lights and background. Any and all C&C welcomed!
thanks,
mike r
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Looking at the wire of your face, here's an idea. Sorta out of left field, but hey! we're artists here and sometimes approching something from an oblique angle can help...
Get a largeish mirror -- or a vanity mirror-- something that's sturdy wall-attatched or someshuch, some dry-erase markers (or something that can be erased/cleaned off from the glass easily). get a comfy chair (oh no! not the comfy chair!). Sit on the chair and make sure you can reach the mirror with the marker comfortably. Now out line the shape of your skull, ears, nose, etc. These "landmarks" will help you get your face in the same postion in case you get interrupted. Now make faces and notice where the muscles are, where the bones are. Open and close your mouth, pay attention to the jaw and such. Raise your eyebrows, close one eye.
Now with the knowledge of where the muscles and such are, using spline-like lines, make a wire-frame drawing on the mirror of your face. Have the spline-lines follow the contours of your face, the eyesockets and "ring" around the lips, etc. Use as many lines as you need to describe the contours of the parts of the face/head.
When you have enough lines, make a freehand drawing, copying what you did on the mirror. Clean the mirror off.
Now try to create a face in A:M using your drawing as a guide (you could even scan the drawing in and use it as a roto.
I hope this idea will give you a "spark" to polish off your head. I've been modeling so intensively in A:M of late that when I look a something I see black spline lines with red squares in the intersections of the lines.
later,
mike r
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very cool picture. If this is any indication, the short will be something else!
It's the attention to details, that you listed that has me really wanting to see this.
thanks for the great picture.
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Great animation. I was all keyed up for this one. As I was watching it I alternated between delight and complete loss of control! So that's the kind of escapades keyboards do when nobody's around...
Really slick job! Thanks for tooting your own horn!
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Nice improvements, Zach.
The eye sockets could be pulled in a bit and the cheekbones could be pulled out also. And the nose, lips and chin could be "angled" a bit and pulled out so the overall shape of the head is kinda like a slanted oval with the nose being the furthest out and the lips the second.
Really like how smooth the model is, looks nice. There's a very slight crease coming from the middle of his eye down to the mouth, maybe with pulling out the cheeks and pullin in the eyesockets could take care of that.
Ears are a real biotch, for sure. I think of an ear as a sylized "C" shape set at an angle pointing towards the chin from the side. The ear angles out from the head towards the back from the top. What helped me when I was doing my Saturn Girl head was to let the splines from the front of the head, back of the head and neck converge on where the ear would be. I made a hole about the shape of the ear. Since I was working on a half-head (to use copy-flip-attach for the other half), I could change to the left view and make that ear-hole smaller when the shape was more or less finished.
Then I extruded once, made this ear-loop a single spline by breaking and reattaching CPs that were not contigious to the spline. This made selecting the ear-loop a lot easier and more controllable. Extruded again, to get the outer bowl shape. Extruded again to get that curved "lip" of the ear's top. While extruding, I worked on the bottom of the ear also to get the shape and size of the ear lobe and the part of the ear that curves inward. The thing that helped me was to just work on one ear-loop at a time and when it's "done" do another extrusion and move CPs around until it looked right. Once the top "lip" of the ear was shaped, extruded again, scaled the extrusion down a bit, and moved it upward to finish the inside of the "lip" and worked on the bottom part. And so it goes...
Helps to have a few reference works on ears around and I did a few drawings to help me get a feel for the ear. My ear took shape when I realized that the ear is *not* concentric circles,but a curvy landscape of sorts.
Oh, one last nit, your ears a bit high... the bottom of the ear should be just a bit below the bottom of the nose. The top of the ear should line up pretty much with the eyes.
Great progress, in any case.
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If that area that's giving you the problem a door (and I seem to think it is and the wireframe looks like it) then maybe be this tute by Jeff Cantin could help you out -- it's about creating seamless hatches and may be just what you need.
You could also bevel the edges, ever so slightly (zoom in real close) and make the natural curves of the splines work for you.
Hope this is of some use for you. Looking forward to this vehicle's evolution!
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Nice cars, Amar.
As far as the lumpiness goes, It looks like the CPs are twisted or wanting to go bent. iirc, adjusting bias can do stuff like that. What I've learned thus far is that if you're going for an abrupt change, try to keep the patches as squarish as possible, and increase resoluion of splines in the area. In the faces I've done, one had a problem kinda like yours, I deleted the spline, CPs that the spline was on and then added new CPs and Splines. ymmv.
Putting up a wireframe could help in this problem.
hth,
mike
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Thanks Zach! Fergot about dem there hooks, I believe they've been zapped in the resultant smoothing, but I'll check and make sure.
Should have another pix up here later on in the day. Finally "got" lights in A:M. Once I figured out lights, it's surprising how much easier they are to use than the ones in C*rr*r*.
Later
mike
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Here's the first result that I'm willing to share as a WIP. Eventually she'll be Saturn Girl from DC Comics Legion (of Super-Heroes). The face still needs some smoothing.
The eyes are from the Animation:Master 2000 handbook by Jeff Paries. I only tweaked the Iris area by moving it inward. In some lighting situations, it'll look cool, as it'll have a hilight in the shadowed area. That's the theory, anyway.
Still getting the hang of renders and lighting in A:M, being used to Carrara for lo these long months. Plan on checking out the Forest or ARM for some tutes on them. Any suggestions?
I used the SAY boneHed as reference, as a number of other resources. The wireframe that Jim Talbot posted in the Alpha 11 hair thread was inspirational for me and I learned a lot by looking at it and trying to apply it to my head. Cindy Grove's tute on facial modeling really helped me get the eyelids right.
The ear is entirely mine, though. I did what could be called a "Reverse Extrusion" -- like with the lips, you start with the shape and then move outward and such. Did about the same thing with the ear, only I shaped a hole, selected the edges of it and extruded and scaled it smaller. Moved CPs around and repeated.
Still needs some work. Think I'll just do a shape for the hair. Eventually I hope to get some kind of "modeled out of clay" type render look for this.
Let me know what you think, no nits too small to pick!
Thanks!
Mike R.
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Here's some stuff that helped me making faces/heads:
Download the SAY hed (find it at the ARM) and then select points and hit the comma key to see where the spline goes. Learned a lot about construction that way. Using rotos help a lot, at least it made a big difference for me.
As Jim Talbot said in the thread (Alpha v11 hair, iirc) a key point in meshes is to try to keep the patches as "square" as possible.
Putting splines where muscles/bones are in the "real" face is a big help in getting the contours right.
Having a mirror handy helped me a lot in getting the nose bridge/eye socket depth-contours better.
hth
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From: MyFitz@aol.com MyFitz@aol.com
Date: 2003-11-19 22:35:16
Yeah but what about the justice league? that was pure comedy and there were
like 15 or so comedians... I mean super heroes.
Wait -- 15 is 3 times 5. And five is 3 plus 2....
all in the way you look at it. I've read Illuminatus! and the more you look for something, the more likely you are to find it.
More threes: three act play; the Father, Son and Holy Ghost; the Law of 3 in some magic (what ever you do to others will come back to you three-fold); the three nights of the full moon.
Speaking of JLA, in the 60-70's, Gardner Fox (the writer) would always have the JLA break up into teams (usually 3) or encounter the bad guy 2 times get beaten and then on the third the JLA would win.
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Agree with SeanC, the face is ...not quite there. It seems to me that the skull is not quite big/high enough. The eyes should be the half-way mark, and in your render the eyes seem to be quite high, almost 1/3 down from the top of the skull, and that's taking in account the hair,btw. And the nose seems to be a bit on the too-long side.
Suggestions, make the head (sans hair) a bit wider, drop the eyes and nose bridge down a bit -- more in the center. And put a eye's width between the eyes. Would help to have a c.u. on the face, front, side and 3/4 view to better see if this is what it needs.
Either the arms are too short, or the hips are too low. The elbow joint should be @ the waist. the tip of the middle finger should come about mid-thigh. That would place the crest of the hip above the wrist.
I like her, nevertheless. Still a bit to go in anycase. Just wondering, did you use rotos when modeling her? I've returned to A:M after about 10 months and have been modeling like crazy and haven't been using any rotoscopes for reference. It was last night when I looked at my latest model (about 10 hrs of work thus far, still a noob) I saw that a lot of porportional stuff was just plain wacky or wrong. This morning I whipped up a front and side 2D drawing for the face, placed them in and things are a lot better. There's something to be said for working from a 2D illustration to make a 3D version it. Not to mention this helps me to keep the modeling "on model" so to speak.
hth
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amazing render
. And the compostition is awesome, too. Well worth the render time. -
Hi all, I'm a returning A:M user. Gave up A:M top of the year and now I'm back, because I realized that there's no better 3D animation program out there (and the fact A:M fits my budget is just a big plus!)
Oh, the question -- I'm using 9.5e in Mac OS 9.2.2, getting re-aligned with using splines rather than polygons and I'm wondering if it would be best if I don't use the hair in A:M 9.5 because it seems that Hair is undergoing a big change with v11. I mean, I don't want to struggle with learning something new and then in a month or two (Planning on getting v11 at MacWorld) having to un-learn it all.
tia
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A few things popped out to me while looking at the pictures (esp. the top one)
Overall great character design! As mentioned before, real cute -- but distinctively yours. Wonderful work there.
The shoes on the two boys should be different. Right now the sock of the fg character "blends" into the shoe of the bg. boy char. Also, are the shoes for the girl supposed to be mismatched? It looks like one shoe's white and the other's pink? And it's visually confusing that it seems that her feet are in front of the tall boy (red shirt) but the rest of her body is behind him.
The shirt of the fg boy, on our right, needs to be wrinkled or at leas the mass of the thigh needs to be "respected" (i.e. as someone said either smartskin or some kind of cloth behavior). This also happens in the bottom graphic with the shorter boy.
Great modeling and (overall) good colors. As far as adding cloth textures goes, it may be a case of overwhelming the design. Sometimes keeping it simple can be the best way for a graphic to pop out.
hth
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The silloutte is good on the figure. The movements are smooth, imho, nice and broad "drama-queen" worthy, iykwim.
Definately needs some secondary movement (like you said, it's not in there yet). But overall, it feels "alive" to me and I really like the Hand-wave and head-shake in the begining of the anim.
About the only real crit I can give is to ask you to ditch the stripes on the pants for renders at this size, bit of a distraction and hard to make out just what the legs are really doing.
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As others have said, excellent animation. As a human owned by a cat myself, the motion is just purrfect (hey, a body's gotta pun once and a while). When the cat moved over the box, *that* was a spot-on cat move if I've ever seen one.
Shayna Punim!!!
in WIP (Archives)
Posted
Looking real good!
The mouth is still a titch off. On a number of wireframed faces I've seen, the splines from the nose go downward to the lips, and there's rings of splines around the lips that connect with the nose splines to form patches.
Very good job!