Alice Cooper

[kingotho]

Very cool stuff man. The suggestion I would make is to sss the eyes a little. I never actually did it, but I ran across some eye sss tutorial out there. I especially love the frozen expression of Alice Cooper's mind horror. You've really captured it.

Moose!
KO

[joe_seig]

Wayne have a look here for a render and settings.

The most current version has better anti-aliasing on the hairtips.
This was done with a not-so-current version which I'll stick with until some rendering is done on this other project.

Check the settings and if you would like, let me see your shaveGlobals and shaveNode panels.

4 hours for a mentalray-shave render is just freaking me out, lol , there has to be a better way!

*edit - oh I should read closer, you have render set to geometry, try buffer.

*edit2 - Another test, perhaps too well groomed.
Forgot to mention I started with the Preset named SPbrunette, then scaled the hair in the edit interface. (not the 'Scale' slider in shaveNode1).
Same settings as before, except I lowered the tip thickness to 0.020, and under Frizz Properties, the Tip Frizz to 10.163

[DarthWayne]

Thanks for posting that info joe, straight away I can see a couple of things I've done differently. I suppose the biggest difference was that for a base for the hair I made two bits of geometry. The first was a 'skullcap' type of thing, and the second was sort of a band that went around from the back to the front / side (on both sides). My thinking behind this was that as the hair at the front and top of the head appears a little shorter (and not knowing a thing about cut maps) it would be easier in the long run.

So I was really interested to see how you did it! The screen caps of the globals and shave node are enclosed. The shave node is exactly the same for both sets of hair. I used the SP Brunette as a basis for mine as well. Hopefully if I get time tonight I'll give it another go using what I can glean from your screen caps as a basis. I didn't have any idea you could resize the hair length in the shave interface either, so your post has been really useful so far. I'll be over the moon if I can get the hair to render in the time you did.

Wayne...
[Edit for being an idiot and forgetting to attach the damn file ]

[joe_seig]

Wayne, some thoughts on the long render time you have experienced:

Keep it simple, no need for two nodes (1.skullcap and 2.band for the same region).
That takes twice the time to compute.

See if setting 'Render Quality' to 'Medium' is acceptable (you have it on 'High'). Ha, the next highest setting after 'High' is called 'Duuude', don't go there.

under your shaveLightList you have 'all', meaning all lights are being considered-computed.
If you could narrow that entry down to just one (or two) spotLights, that would speed things up.
The docs have further info on that.
Since I don't know your light setup, this may be a mute point.

Use the skullcap as bulk mass to give the hair volume. Don't try to accomplish mass with high 'Hair Count', since that number will increase the render.
The denser the geometry on the skull cap, then logically more hair will sprout from said geometry. Consider that when modeling it. (i.e. more here, less there)
Don't smooth the cap after applying the shaveNode., weird things can happen, eventually.

Get very familiar with the 'style hair' interface (Shave > Edit Current > Style Hair)
That's the backbone of the plugin, and almost all of your editing can be achieved there.(scale, translate, rotate, on and on)

Here's a .gif showing the hair example using shake mode.

Great for globally adjusting the hair, but make sure your Global Dynamic Parameters - Gravity is set low, default is 1, here it's 0.050.

Keep exploring it, you'll be over the moon soon enough.

[billrobertson42]

Pardon the OT comment, but I love your website Joe.

[DarthWayne]

Thanks for the info Joe, that gives me some more stuff to try out and to learn. Once hes got his hair sorted my job list on this is:

1 - Give the bloke some teeth for gods sakes
2 - Same for mouth and tounge etc.
3 - Rig the head and pose.
4 - Revisit and revise all textures and shaders if needed.

Once I have that sorted then it's ont the main composition. So far i have a choice of two.... loks like before long I'll have a choice to make.

Wayne...
PS Bill no worries I have to admit I love Joes work as well...I could look at his stuff for ages.

[joe_seig]

heheh thanks fellas!, glad you like the site.
But since the topic at hand here is Wayne's cool Alice Cooper character...
with his messy hair...

Some more thoughts:

Check also how few Passes you can get away with, more will give you a better translucent-subtle quality, but also increases render time.
Usually it's best to start with the crappiest settings and hair count, then by increments increase those, noticing how that affects the look, and your render time.
Maybe try styling his hair at a low hair count, before adding more to the count. Less splines and easier to adjust. Experiment.

No need to sort the hair out before moving on... since it's attached to seperate geometry you can come back to it, or delete it, and try again anytime.
That's the advantage of not having it attached directly to your head geometry (but you could do that too). Just parent the skullcap to a head bone and you're good to go.

Disclaimer: I own no stock investments in Shave and a Haircut, am not a sales distibutor, nor related by birth or marriage to the company...LOL!
They do work very hard at focusing on and improving cg hair... sans the big corporation feel.

Hope this helps Wayne, I could feel your frustration from across the Atlantic.
Alice Cooper fan here, and a fan of your WIP too!

Looking forward to seeing his teeth!

[DarthWayne]

Latest Hair Test - Close but no Cigar just Yet

Disclaimer: I own no stock investments in Shave and a Haircut, am not a sales distibutor, nor related by birth or marriage to the company...LOL!
They do work very hard at focusing on and improving cg hair... sans the big corporation feel.

Hope this helps Wayne, I could feel your frustration from across the Atlantic.
Alice Cooper fan here, and a fan of your WIP too!

Looking forward to seeing his teeth!

OK here's another hair test, I'm still learning the shave interface properly so it's not final hair by any means but its a whole lot better than it has been. I owe ya one Joe. I'm still shocked that people I respect as artists (including yourself) like this model. I started this basically for myself and I've sort of got this compulsion to finish this model whatever it takes.

Render times are now down to about 10-15 mins when I'm rendering hair. So I'm going to set up some render passes to cut the time down a little. I feel I need a bit more variation in the colour of the strands of hair, so I'm going to spend some time playing around with that till i get someonething I like thats close to the hair alice has. Although on a side note to this, I do have a certain amount of room to manuviour as alice is always changing his hair. LOL

Hopefully the teeth wont be as bad to do. I normally like to get things done in 'sections' so I know that I am free to move on to the next part.

Wayne..

[Moochie]

"Hopefully the teeth wont be as bad to do."

definitely more shave than haircut for the teeth, I'm thinking.

Looking good.

Now go and stand in front of the class and write 'manoeuvre' 10 times on the blackboard.

[DarthWayne]

"Hopefully the teeth wont be as bad to do."

definitely more shave than haircut for the teeth, I'm thinking.

Looking good.

Now go and stand in front of the class and write 'manoeuvre' 10 times on the blackboard.

manoeuvre
manoeuvre
manoeuvre
manoeuvre
manoeuvre
manoeuvre
manoeuvre
manoeuvre
manoeuvre
manoeuvre
(Does cut and paste count )

Hairy Teeth eh? You know that might just work. But seriously there's still a long way to go with the hair yet, I guess in an ideal world I should have been already able to use shave before putting it in a model. Life never seems to work like that for me, mind you they say its good to go 'in at the deep end'.

Wayne...

[joe_seig]

"I'm still shocked that people I respect as artists (including yourself) like this model."

A nostalgic attraction to the subject first sparked my interest...
If it had been Britney, well...
She was never accused of biting the head off a live chicken on stage. (eeew, but she kissed maddana).

You've chosen to recreate someone with very interesting facial features and characteristics.

Then seeing the struggle and effort (yes, it's difficult!) to get the model convincing, where we see your process working really well, and at times not as well.
That's part of the formula for checking out your progress here, which seems to be going well!

As for the hair, glad to be of service, but 10-15 minutes for such a hair render still seems a bit off.
Are you holding on to the two original shaveNodes you started with? That could possibly be it.
As well as the resolution size you've set.
Of course the power in your cpu is obviously a factor, ram, processors, blah bla.

Just a little suggestion on his likeness if I may
Really study this guy's nose a little closer, it defines so much of the character in his face.
There aren't many profile shots of him, but in the photo gallery at alicecooper.com there's a good one.
It doesn't flatter him to make his nose so small, and there's more going on with the bridge, and how it meets the bulb. Just my take on it anyway.

Keep on it Wayne, and btw congrats on your new member of the family
ps... just got your PM, I'll check it out...

[DarthWayne]

I was sort of hoping no one would notice I sort of messed up the nose a bit. I was going to discreetely go back at the end and redo it So you've called my hand a bit and I'll have to redo the nose early But I think it can wait till after the hair is sorted. I got you email a few minutes ago, and all going well will pass over the relevant info about the hair node tomorrow. (Thus not filling the thread with posts. )

Progress may be a little slow over xmas.

Wayne...

[DarthWayne]

Just hair work done on this render. It's getting closer and more lifelike (thanks to Joe's guidance) but still has more work to be done on it. The ammount of time I'm spending in 'shave' I'll be a sodding expert at this rate.
I also managed to mess up not only my lighting but my skin shader today due to some innate fiddling on my part. Obviously it's spoiled the skin somewhat but I'l put that right soon.

Wayne...

[DarthWayne]

A SubSurface Effect Test in Zbrush with Photoshop Post.


Just for a change I thought I'd post a little test of an idea I had to get a subsurface type of effect in zbrush. The workflow seems to work fine although some crits would be nice. Soon it'll be back to the 'proper' renders with hair in Maya / Mental Ray. (BTW the teeth are just a set I downloaded from here as a make do, i got sick of loking at a toothless alice ).


Wayne...

[DarthWayne]

Latest Hair Render.

Here it is folks the latest of the many hair tests. It's looking more like hair now and more realistic (due to motivation and guidance from Joe). I think it still needs more 'chaos' as the hair's still way too neat. In most 1986-91 Alice Cooper shots it looks like he never brushed his hair, so I'm going to try my best to get as close as possible to that look.

At times I think it would have ben so much easier to make a character with short hair. But not half as much fun though.
Enjoy

Wayne...