Resurected old model

[Fuchur]

Much better you are right...

 

Really nice model...

 

*Fuchur*

[SHADOWMASTER]

Hmmm... I don't think you will ever see a woman like that in a bodybuilding competition.

Yeah, most of 'em usually look like guys...

 

And besides, who can knock a woman willing to stand so patiently and so scantily in a field like that?

LOL!

 

While I do like the "gothic-ness" of the original model, your revision is much better.

 

Truely stunning work. Can't wait to see more. (No! Not like that... )

[vnavone]

Hi Yves, great stuff! I think I'll be using your skin shader in my short film.

 

I have a couple of questions about the skin shader (I couldn't find any documentation on your site):

 

First off, what do the "shading falloff" and "hue shift from saturation" controls do? The former didn't seem to have any effect when I changed values, and I'm not not sure of the use of the latter.

 

Also, what diffuse shading model are you using? Is it based on CookTorrence or a gradient?

 

Would it be possible for this shader to control ambience and ambient color too, or would that have to be a separate ambient shader? What I've really been wanting to see is an ambient gradient shader - a shader that behaves just like the diffuse gradient shader but controls ambience value and color instead. This would allow the user to pull the shading terminator beyond the point of surface tangency with the light source (let me know if I'm not saying that right) so that a single light can "wrap around" an object without changing the diffuse color. I'm thinking this would be useful for giving the appearance of light bouncing around beneath the skin (fake SSS). Might cause problems with shadows, though. Any thoughts?

[zandoriastudios]

Yves,

It is really an amazing tour de force! The modeling, skylights, skin shader, hair --You really set the standard for mastery!!!

 

Something about the model seemed familiar, I had seen Mike James's figurines a few years ago but it didn't click until you said(wrote) the name.

 

Thanks for the explanation of the skydome settings, I was having trouble understanding this and I think that will help me

 

Thank you SO VERY VERY MUCH for the skin shader!!!!!! I have been wishing for something like this forever! You are my hero!

[John Keates]

Hi there Mr Navone,

 

I can answere some of your questions as I had the plugin a while back and battered Yves with similar questions (sorry Yves for butting in here).

 

The shading model is Oren-Neyar (usually used for rough surfaces - but I guess you know that).

 

The "hue shift from saturation" thing effects the amount that the skin colour changes as you go towards the terminater (richer and redder). As far as I can see, it shifts the colour allong the spectrum. This is independent from the "blood" part of the equation.

 

Yves would like to work on an ambience shader but as yet, the renderer doesn't allow for calculations beyond the terminator. I guess that it would have to be a seperate shader and that this is why there is an "ambiant shader" option waiting to be used.

 

Hope that helps.

[ypoissant]

Thanks John for gettin in. I was overbusy with some paperwork. But I need a break so here are my explanations:

 

The shading model is based on Oren-Nayar. So the roughness attribute controls the diffuse falloff in the Oren-Nayar way.

 

The Diffuse-Falloff attribute is actually not used. It is a remnent of an old way I tried to control the diffuse falloff but the Oren-Nayar method gives way better results. The fact that it is still there is an oversight.

 

Saturation start and end control when the raises in saturation will start and end in the shade calculation: 0% is where you get full light on the model and 100% is where is the terminator. If you set start at anything less than 0%, the saturation shift will already be affected at full light and if you set the end at anything more than 100%, the saturation shift will not be complete at the terminator.

 

Hue shift from saturation controls the lag or the negative lag of the hue shift relative to the saturation shift. In real persons photograph, the two are realtively in sync. But some painters like to start the hue shift fefore the saturation shift (or is this the reverse? I'm not sure now. Anyway, you can experiment). One notable example of this are the Bisley paintings. So if you want the hue to start shifting before the saturation starts raising, you set to some negative percent value.

 

The hue shift is an interpolation between the skin hue and the blood hue on the hue weel. It always take the shortest arc between the two hues.

 

I think Saturation strength and Blood showthrough are self explaining and you can get some really weird gradient effect by pushing them high.

 

Now, about controling the ambiance surface attribute:

 

I've started working on this concept several years ago when Andy WHittock was gladly programing plugins and I never touched the SDK yet. At this time, I analysed skin photographs. First of real peoples photographed in different lighting setups and then of well recognized painters. From this I developped a model of how the skin react to light.

 

Because of this method, I could not compute the effect of SSS and the shift in ambiance because ambiance is a CG concept that have no equivalence in reality and evem less in photographs. Even in CG, once the effect of ambiance is computed, the only information you are left with is the color which can be translated into hue, saturation and value or somethiung equivalent but not into ambiance. And even there, the available SDK didn't have any ways to control the ambiance attribute of a surface.

 

So I implemented this model in an application that could output gradient specifications which could be used with the A:M gradient shader. But the gradient shader does not work with color mapped or materialled skins and that was a problem. The solution was to program a shader which would take any current skin color that is already there and proces it so that it produces the same shifts that are apparent in real skins. This brought me to devise en even more abstract model of how light interact with skin and the result is this plugin.

 

Now that the SDK offers an ambiance shader, I may get back to this project and develop a skin shader v2 eventually. I actually haven't test if the ambiance shader API do gets called beyond the terminator. I would guess it does.

 

Please don't hesitate to ask any further questions. Whatever comes out of this will likely gets posted on the plugin page as explanations.

[John Keates]

Oooops!.... Looks like bits of my version were a little off.... sorry.

[tanassi]

very great job Yves,

 

would you show us a close up of the face splineage?

 

thanks... Vincenzo

[ypoissant]

Here's the head mesh.

 

BTW, the teeth, gums and tongue are those from Jeff Lee (Godfrey).

[ypoissant]

And here's a closup on the ear

[Mega]

What impresses me the most is the attention to detail and how the form is so well built. It shows a strong understanding of anatomy and of facial structure.

 

Very, very nice.

 

Tony

[JTalbotski]

Wow! Those are the best 3D modelled ears I have ever seen. Uh... the other body parts are kind of nice, too.

 

Great work, Yves!

 

Jim

[tanassi]

thank you Yves for the images. very very nice.

this will give me new inspiration for my WIP singer.

did you ever seen her? http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6389

 

thanks again... Vincenzo

[ypoissant]

Yes, I've seen her in your thread.

[KenH]

Being a man of numbers, Yves, I wonder if this girl conforms to the "PHI proportion principle"?

[ypoissant]

Like any attempt to fit Phi into beauty proportions, I'm sure if I were to try, I would find some "evidences" that this girl fits, somehow, somewhere, the golden rule. And I could produce one Phi pattern that proves it. But I didn't attempt to do that explicitly. I use numbers when I program but when I do artistic work, I don't even think about numbers.

 

I believe the golden rule is not a garantee of beauty. One could use the phi proportion extensively and still produce monstruous characters.

 

The golden proportion is a tool. No more. It is nice to know and can be used as simple rules when learning or teaching composition for instance but it is not a religion. I used to use the golden proportion explicitly years ago to eventually abandon it (although I find it pops in my compositions regularly even though I don't use my ruler and calculator anymore).

 

One observation I did, while developing a product that builds faces (composite pictures). We were several people working with this product during its development. Of course, each of us tried hard to build the perfect beauty face. Each of us had our own set of rules for making a beauty. Each of us did produce very beautiful faces but we all produced very different beauties nevertheless. I learned that beauty cannot be reduced to a simple set of rules. And certainly not to a set of Phi lines.

 

There are more examples of art masterpieces that don't use the golden ratio than the reverse.

[Emilio Le Roux]

I've already said this model is fantastic!

 

And now I just STOLE a solution from it!

 

 

I noticed you kind of 'rolled' the forearm's cross section splines from the elbow to the hand. I think this was very clever! That's the idea I was missing.

 

So, when the hand rolls back to a more natural position (which would be with palms pointing to front, for instance) the splines will be straigth.

 

This is great for decaling the way I'm currently doing, slicing the model in front and back stamps! now I can easily tweak the geometry so the palms are flat in the back view.

 

Just to mention... the face and haircut you just showed remembers me A LOT that Agent 99 from the old Maxwell Smart series. Remember her? beautiful woman.. only black haired.

 

Thanks Yves! your work is inspiring.

[ypoissant]

Just to mention... the face and haircut you just showed remembers me A LOT that Agent 99 from the old Maxwell Smart series. Remember her? beautiful woman.. only black haired.

I don't remember her because I never saw the serie. The head is my attempt to reproduce the spirit of Mila Jovovich in this photo:

[Guyon]

um, Could you medel come out better then the real thing?

You work is very nice.

[ypoissant]

Here is an update. What I've done:

- Finished reworking the legs, feet, arms, hands, back and front torso.

- Changed the proportions. Now the head is smaller to bring it back in proportion to a 5'8" tall woman (Fuchur, I think this is what looked disproportionate to you. Indeed, she had 'petite' proportions, which were not bad but thi is not what I was looking for.

- The legs are longet too.

 

Now I need to work on the trocanter, gluteus medius and gluteus maximus area. That's currently the last area which I'm not too pleased with.

[Emilio Le Roux]

Wow, then you got really close to this pic.

 

 

I am very surprised for the fact you never watched Get Smart, the series.

 

here's a page about Barbara Feldon, although she's older in these pics. The resemblance I found before was more probably because of Mila's retro hairstyle.

 

http://www.triviatribute.com/barbarafeldon.html

[Emilio Le Roux]

Once again, awesome work.

 

say, just for curiosity: are you trying the model with some rigging as you model it, or you're just modeling for now?

[Dearmad]

I liked the bigger head... But then it's a personal taste thing at this point, certainly not a real crit.

[ypoissant]

Emilio,

 

I'm just modeling for now. In the past, I've had problems with modifying a character after it was rigged. So I will wait until I'm satisfied with the model before completing the rigging. The head is already rigged though but because I resized the head and the bones, the smartskins I did for the eyes and the mouth are no longer usable. I will have to scrap them and restart.

 

About the Get Smart serie, I think it never aired here in this part of Canada. Or at least, I was never aware of it. If there were one female character from an old TV serie that I would model, it is Diana Rigg playing Emma Peel in the Avengers serie. Another one, which is no a TV character though, would be Betty Page. I might try her haircut on the model though.

 

Dearmad,

 

I kind of liked the bigger head too. Actually, the way the head came to this size is interesting. When I brought the body and the head together, the head was quite large. I then resized it to some visually more normal proportion but I thought it looked too small. So I resized the head to a size that looked to me as more appropriate. That is the head size that I posted first. When I replied to Fuchur, I took the height of the model (I always model to real sizes) and observed that the size of the head was much larger than normal for her height. I either could resize the head only and make her 5'10" or resize the whole body and make her 5'2" and I chose a sort of compromize and made her 5'8". That makes her 8 head height BTW which is the proportion I automatically use when I draw the female.

 

In retrospective, I think that I mis-scaled the head in the first place because I was working with a bald head. The minute I rendered her with the hair on, I thought the head was too large. Now, at 8 head height, I still think the head is too small when bald but looks more natural with the hair.

[jakerupert]

Hey Yves,

 

 

I like your work very much and I agree with you that your first headversion looked

slightly too big, but sorry in my opinion now it looks way too small , killing that stylized Mike James cute pin-up girl look and going in the direction of one of these overtrained body-building girls.

 

It might not be the right thing to aim at realistic proportions with the head, when the whole figure is unrealistic.......

 

You surly know the french Cartoon-artist Dani and his sexy girls?

 

Thats the extreme end of the proportions your first version resembled a little at first, and which I think matches better for sexy pinup-girls style.

 

Maybe you should look at it again after some time and reconsider.

 

Another thing: How do you plan to use this model later on?

 

Won`t it be a copyrightproblem then, when you used a figurine of Mike James

or Emma Peel for modeling ?

 

Maybe that`s another thread, but I am just interested, if one could run into problems there.

 

As I said, my critic has nothing to do, which that I admire your genius modeling very much.

 

;>) Jake

[ypoissant]

I know what you mean about the head size. The more I work on the model, the more I can feel what's wrong. I think I really modeled a 5'2" body. Not a 5'8" or 5'10" body. Taking the body alone, its height vs width and depth, it really have the 'petite' proportion. So an 8 head height does make the head look small indeed. I have two choice with this: 1) I resize the body relative height to width and depth proportion (that is I basically scale it on X and Z) to fit a 5'8" tall girl or I just simply resize the whole body without touching the its relative XYZ proportion and model a 5'2". I'm still not decided yet and I still may decide any of the two ways. I still have not rejected the possibility to model a 5'2" girl.

 

The difference with Mike James pin-up girls and this model is that Mike James pin-ups are small scale models designed to be looked at as such. The model will be used in different situations and within different environments. And I want her to be placed in natural environments and I don't want to head to appear too large in those environments. Furthermore, if you examine James pin-up girls, the larger scale they are, the smaller the relative head size.

 

I don't know the work of Dani but I know several other French cartoon artists who draw their woman with large heads. Goossens is one late and very popular example which did something in 3D, I think it's called "The Girl". The cultural cartoon tendency, for years, for a lot of artists (not exclusively French) is to kind of put a baby head on a woman body which give them a definitive "cutiness" factor. If you were to remove the eyeliner, the lipstick and all the makeup which adds the unmistakable sexy features, then the baby head is very apparent. The unmapped head meshes posted by Goossens makes it very obvious. This is clearly not the route I want to take. I want to model a stylized model but not with a baby head.

 

I got all sort of plans for the model. Will I have the time to do them all is another story. But yes, I definitely plan to use the model.

 

As to copyright issues, there is nothing wrong, legally or ethically, with being inspired by another artist. If I were to model one of James pin-up figurine as is, then that would be a problem. What is copyrighted is the character he built. That is including the clothing, the makeup, the haircut and the accessories. Not the approach to anatomy.

 

Furtheremore, my current model is very different in proportion than James figurines if only in the hips and shoulder/upper torso sizes plus a lot of other more subtle differences. The whole head is also completely different especially in profile view. All of those differences are a question of preferences. Another significant difference is in the depth of his muscular definition. Because of the size of his figurine, he have to carve in quite deep. At first I wanted to go that route. But this does not work for a 3D model or at least I didn't like the look too much. So I considerably reduced the muscular carving definition to get a more subtle muscular defintion although still stylized.

 

Same thing for Emma Peel. Because it is a live person, and not a character, I would have to be darn good at modeling, texturing and posing to even approach a resemblance that would cause copyright issue. Beside, I don't really have a plan to model her.

[SHADOWMASTER]

Same thing for Emma Peel. Because it is a live person, and not a character, I would have to be darn good at modeling, texturing and posing to even approach a resemblance that would cause copyright issue.

But... a person isn't copyrighted anyway. I mean, the person might have a problem with it, but I don't think there could be legal action taken. Unless it'd be infringing on their personal rights or something...

 

Anyway, I can't remember if I've replied to this thread or not, but in case I haven't:

 

Simply amazing work. I am truely asounded. Keep up the great work, and I will worship you until the day I die.

[SHADOWMASTER]

Grrrr... stupid thing double posted!!! (sorry)

[luckbat]

But... a person isn't copyrighted anyway. I mean, the person might have a problem with it, but I don't think there could be legal action taken. Unless it'd be infringing on their personal rights or something...

 

Celebrities own the rights to their "likeness." Courts grant a certain leeway for satire and caricature, but you can't, for example, draw the Three Stooges and sell T-shirts of your drawing.

 

http://www.rcfp.org/news/2001/0502stooge.html

 

The decision ultimately rests on how "transformative" your work is. A photorealistic doll of Diana Rigg might not be legal to sell, while a cartooney version of her might be okay. Witness a comic that featured a thinly veiled version of albino blues singers The Winters Brothers. In the comic, two albino cowboys named The Autumn Brothers are revealed to be half-worm tentacled creatures. The Winter brothers sued, but the courts rejected the lawsuit in favor of DC Comics.

 

http://www.tcj.com/254/n_winters.html

 

On the other hand, Arnold Schwarzenegger was recently able to stop production of a "bobblehead" doll of himself, though he later granted permission in exchange for certain changes to the doll.

 

Yves is clearly in no danger here, but yes, celebrities do in fact own the legal rights to their image.

[Dearmad]

You miss one point- Yves isn't selling or distributing in a commercial manner. He can do what he wants so long as he's short of this step.

 

I've never understood why so many people forget about this, the most critical aspect of copyright law.

[chris]

Thanks Yves for the Skin Shader!

 

Small problem I am having though... I have had success when rendering from the modeling window and applying it through the Render to File Settings/Option Tab to the whole scene, however when I apply it to just a Group or Model's properties, it won't render!?!

 

Is there a setting somewhere that turns this feature on/off or overrides it to default render settings? I have read the manual concerning Render Shaders however I haven't found a solution to this issue as of yet. Any ideas?

[jon]

copyright violations can occur without money changing hands. please see 10 big myths about copyright explained.

 

while yves' initial model was heavily inspired by mr. james' work, i doubt his improved model would excite any lawyers... in a legal sense. ' ' )

 

-jon

[ypoissant]

If you applied the skin shader to a group. then in the "render to file"->"options" pannel, you should set "render shaders" to ON but set all the actual shaders, in this pannel, to "none".

[chris]

OK Yves, I'll try that again when I get home tonight, though that IS the first thing I remember trying when the shader wouldn't work for me.

 

Well, I'll see tonight I guess!

[Bugle]

Fine model you've made there, although I can't help thinking it might be a little patch heavy still... compared to Joe W's hunter or my own models, I feel she could lose a spline loop here and there and keep the shape definition pretty much the same while improving animatability.

 

Regarding the rigging in mid animation, when I discovered the smartskin feature that lets you tweak in the middle of an action I was quite taken with the idea, but then I ran into problems with popping CPs and the difficulty in locating smartskin keys once created. If you have any solution for this I'm

all ears

[artunemedia]

Dear Yves,

 

Apparently, I just recieved the info on the skin shader but the link is gone. Is there a new link.

 

Thanks,

 

Michael Angelo

 

Here is an explanation I wrote on the "Naomi" Wip page:

 

The outdoor sunny lighting look comes from the bluish surrounding light that comes from the sky and a yellowish light that comes from the sun.

 

The easiest way to get this effect is with 3 lights:

1 yellowish sun light (I like to use a bulb for that)

1 bluish skylight light

1 bluish negative sun light (I like to use a bulb for that)

 

The main idea is to set the bluish and the yellowish lights at the exact opposite spectrum on the hue weel. You could use a straight yellow sun light or to get a warmer light lean a tiny bit toward orange and to get a hot light, lean more agressively toward orange. The saturation is maximum and the lightness is about 80%.

 

Once you have selected your yellow for the sun, you now set your skylight light and your negative sun light to the exact opposite bluish color on the hue weel. Again maximum saturation and about 80% lightness.

 

Of course, as you mentionned, you have to reduce the skylight light intensity. First I turn OFF the sun and the negative sun lights and adjust the skylight light intensity so that I still have nice shape shade definition but rather with about 1/3 or 1/2 the normal lighting intensity I would use with the slylight alone.

 

Now here is the trick: Turn ON both the sun light and the negative sun light. In choreography, on the negative sun, add translate and orient like constraints like the sun. On the Negative Sun attributes, set the intensity to minus 10%. Then adjust the (positive) sun intensity to get a nice bright light with clearly visible shadows. Some overexposure can help convey the feeling of the sunny day.

 

The negative bluish sun trick is to help enhance the bluish shadows vs the yellowish lights. The negative sun will remove some of the blue shades coming from the skylight where the yellowish sun should hit. By playing with the sun vs negative sun intensity, you can enhance this effect even further (but don't overdo it). My goal, with such a setup is to approach the lightings achieved by some painters (the Hildebrandt brothers or Maxfield Parish are notable examples).

 

I basicaly use this technique except that instead of using a bluish skylight light, I use a skydone with a mapped sky which serves as a color filter for the skylight. Apart from that, the negative sun light technique is used exactly as described. And I use my 20 lights skylight rig with 2 rays cast and 9 passes multipass.

 

As for the skintone. That's quite another story. Except for the face which have a whole set of maps (color, specularity size and intensity, bump, etc.) the body is only flat colored. The subtlety in the skintone comes from two things: 1) the blue-yellow lighting setup and most important, a skin plugin that I wrote which does this red transition between the light and the shadow side of the surfaces. I've attached the skin.shd plugin for everybody to download and try. (Note to Mac users: I'm waiting for the people at Hash to come back from vacation to get a Mac version of the plugin. My first intention was to wait for the two versions to be aailable before offering it for download. But since I mention it here, I might as well post it.).

[TheJunglist]

Bump. I would love to get that .shd too

[artunemedia]

Dear Yves,

 

The skin shader link is broken, is it possible to place it on your website or provide an alternate link?

 

Thanks kindly,

 

MIchael Angelo

 

 

 

 

quote name='ypoissant' date='Aug 23 2004, 02:37 PM' post='44824']

Here is an explanation I wrote on the "Naomi" Wip page:

 

The outdoor sunny lighting look comes from the bluish surrounding light that comes from the sky and a yellowish light that comes from the sun.

 

The easiest way to get this effect is with 3 lights:

1 yellowish sun light (I like to use a bulb for that)

1 bluish skylight light

1 bluish negative sun light (I like to use a bulb for that)

 

The main idea is to set the bluish and the yellowish lights at the exact opposite spectrum on the hue weel. You could use a straight yellow sun light or to get a warmer light lean a tiny bit toward orange and to get a hot light, lean more agressively toward orange. The saturation is maximum and the lightness is about 80%.

 

Once you have selected your yellow for the sun, you now set your skylight light and your negative sun light to the exact opposite bluish color on the hue weel. Again maximum saturation and about 80% lightness.

 

Of course, as you mentionned, you have to reduce the skylight light intensity. First I turn OFF the sun and the negative sun lights and adjust the skylight light intensity so that I still have nice shape shade definition but rather with about 1/3 or 1/2 the normal lighting intensity I would use with the slylight alone.

 

Now here is the trick: Turn ON both the sun light and the negative sun light. In choreography, on the negative sun, add translate and orient like constraints like the sun. On the Negative Sun attributes, set the intensity to minus 10%. Then adjust the (positive) sun intensity to get a nice bright light with clearly visible shadows. Some overexposure can help convey the feeling of the sunny day.

 

The negative bluish sun trick is to help enhance the bluish shadows vs the yellowish lights. The negative sun will remove some of th

 

 

e blue shades coming from the skylight where the yellowish sun should hit. By playing with the sun vs negative sun intensity, you can enhance this effect even further (but don't overdo it). My goal, with such a setup is to approach the lightings achieved by some painters (the Hildebrandt brothers or Maxfield Parish are notable examples).

 

I basicaly use this technique except that instead of using a bluish skylight light, I use a skydone with a mapped sky which serves as a color filter for the skylight. Apart from that, the negative sun light technique is used exactly as described. And I use my 20 lights skylight rig with 2 rays cast and 9 passes multipass.

 

As for the skintone. That's quite another story. Except for the face which have a whole set of maps (color, specularity size and intensity, bump, etc.) the body is only flat colored. The subtlety in the skintone comes from two things: 1) the blue-yellow lighting setup and most important, a skin plugin that I wrote which does this red transition between the light and the shadow side of the surfaces. I've attached the skin.shd plugin for everybody to download and try. (Note to Mac users: I'm waiting for the people at Hash to come back from vacation to get a Mac version of the plugin. My first intention was to wait for the two versions to be aailable before offering it for download. But since I mention it here, I might as well post it.).

[Rodney]

Check Steve Sappington's reply in your other post.