new characters going on

[Emilio Le Roux]

I'm modeling some new characters for a story.

 

Here I modeled a character's head after a frontal picture as a rotoscope, then what I did was to apply the decal in the same position as the rotoscope!

 

I'm pleased with the results of this technique. Even though I will have to remake the textures later, I can use this rough picture as a base.

 

 

 

 

 

One of the problems is that the texture has some 'built in ilumination', because the original foto has a lighting on its own. Even so, I think that little 'cheat' doesn't interfere much with scene lighting yet can improve realism.

 

I tried giving the object an opposite lighting here (from below).

 

 

Comments and critiques are very welcome.

 

Emilio Le Roux

[SeanC.]

WOWEEE!!! Thats a great job Emilio!! Thats not the easiest technique but you pulled it off very nicely. With a little touchup here and there in PSP (i plug the cheap versions) it will come out nicely!

 

SeanC.

[Rodney]

Looking VERY good! More please.

 

If you can share any technique/advice that would be helpful to everyone. (i.e. I'm part of the subset of everyone)

[Pengy]

Amazing! I've seen this technique used in "other" apps and I think you've bettered the attempts I've viewed. I say what ever gets the job done and this definately gets it done with room to spare.

[Jimmy neutron]

What the smack?! How the? WoooooHoooo, Wickedness!!!!!!

[Emilio Le Roux]

Hey! thank you for your comments! i didn't expected so many wee and wohoos and something about a smack too. My english is not very good but i'll take them all as inspiring.

 

Well, there are some tricks about what i'm doing. Not enough for a tute although.

 

To tell the true, i've modeled some faces in my AM life, but never got 100% satisfied about them. Finally, I came out with this wireframe, that has not a single hook and plenty of 4 point patches in critical areas.

 

 

This makes the head highly morphable and animatable, so i decided to use it as a 'mother of all heads'. So, I didn't 'model' this human male in particular. Instead, I just 'morphed' this "primordial head" to fit the new rotoscope, taking about 1 hour.

 

As I needed better definition on the nose, I added some splines later (which bother me because i'm obsessed about the hook things).

 

Here's the resulting wireframe:

 

 

Then I applied the rotoscope as a texture:

 

 

 

 

I'm using this wireframe to build all sort of characters, from demons to women and children, even using the distortion box to create weird characters!

Although women are a more delicate work and morphing takes a little more time.

 

Well, that's all. So I'm cheating

Thank you again for your comments.

 

Emilio Le Roux

[ypoissant]

Emilio,

 

Your head is looking real good. Here's a trick to correct (up to some point) uneven illumination in your photographed map. It is a little complex but it works. This is done in Photoshop. I picked this trick from DV Garage a while ago:

• Load your photograph in Photoshop.
  
• Change the image mode to Lab.
  
• Select the whole L channel and copy.
  
• Create a new RGB document, paste the L channel, flatten and convert to 16 bits.
  
• Apply gaussian blur untill the skin little details (those which you want to keep) are no more visible.
  
• Spread the histogram as whide as possible
  
• Invert the image
  
• Convert back to 8 bits
  
• Convert the background to layer and change its blend mode to overlay
  
• Copy the original L channel under the blurred layer
  
• Adjust the blured layer transparency until you get the most uniform shade of gray.
  
• Once satisfied, copy merged the result
  
• Paste in your original L channel
  
• Convert back to RGB
  
• Save your new bitmap
  

This trick helps greatly with non uniform illuminations in photographs but it doesn't cope so well with highlights in the photograph. You will need to add manual touchups. Nevertheless, it greatly improves the situation.

[JBarrett]

Wow! Very nice work there! I need to get off my duff and try modeling some characters one of these days.

[Emilio Le Roux]

Thank you, Yves. I'll try that.

 

In the meanwhile, I've been working on the body. But textures are still to be worked on.

 

The method i'm using for decaling is not perfect, but i think it renders good results.

 

I managed to flatten and decal all the character skin in 2 stamps, in a single highres decal. In this 'flattening', the head, hands and feet are very large proportionally to the body, as they need more detail, and this way I get a continuous skin without seams on the neck and between limbs, etc. (even thu the seams between front and back have to be carefully retouched).

 

Here's my decal (from the UV editor)

 

 

There are some tricks... For instance, after applying the face decal (without flattening), I had to render the flattened model, so the face texture had the right distortion to take it into photoshop and integrate with the main body texture.

 

This way I can also apply unflattened decals from various angles, for the hands, muscles, elbows, legs, feet, etc, then render the whole flattened model and work on this image on photoshop.

 

Sorry for this extensive and unclear explanation...

 

well, here's the result so far:

 

 

 

Emilio

[JohnArtbox]

Great work Emilio, it looks fantastic. I know a lot of purists dislike the photomapping method because of the false lighting cues, but it's definitely the easiest way to get a photorealistic render.

Yves great tip

[Rodney]

Wow again! Your posts really explain the process... and the results are truly impressive. I especially like your tip of reusing/altering your basic splines to create other faces. Now that is a useful and time saving tip!

 

Keep inspiring us! There may be hope for us 2D types yet.

[JBarrett]

Man....I know I already replied, but this is getting way too cool! Very inspiring work! Keep it up!

[shaunf]

Great stuff Emilio! Keep it comin'!