She calls herself 'Pride'.

[C-Mad]

The sheer fabric is simply luscious, and we are all envious and curious as to how you made it.

The anatomy looks "rubbery." Like the fingers, the arms are too even, with no contours. She need not be "cut" like a body builder, but there needs to be SOME definition of a skeleton beneath the skin. If you look at pictures of anorexic women, you will see no muscle tone, but you still have shaping due to bone structure. This absolutely lovely woman has no bone structure, she is build upon a tubular core, and it shows too much.

The same with the face. Particularly around the mouth, there is no musculature to create the contours of her face. Everything is "picture perfect" smooth, when no such face exists, even on newborns too fresh to have developed character lines. There is still musculature beneath the skin.

Fabulous clothing, though. Please, PLEASE do share how you got that translucency!

~OM

[Chokmah]

Exactly C-Mad , that exactly what I tried to explain on my previous post ^^
I did her while learning animation and deformation in XSI, without scultping muscles tentions and bones lying under them on the posed model, but trying creating that with enveloppe deformations .
It seems that I didn't get the result I wanted to acheive that way.
I think I'll sculpt my next 'In Pose' lol

Nice that you like the picture anyway, thank you

Just a question : about trasnlucency, are you talking about the skin trasnlucency ? ^^

[C-Mad]

Regarding the translucency, I am interested in the area just left of center, where the sheer lace veil is over the skin from the shoulder down to the edge of the black bodice. The arm to the left is too dark and shadowed, the chest too high-key contrast. But that one section conveys perfect ligh diffusion through the sheer, while still creating proper skin illumination.

I'm assuming it has to do with the material you did the lace sheer with, and how you deformed it to fit over the figure, but the material could make all the difference...

~OM

[sgrell]

Well I like the nose just the way it is. Look at the nose on the female character from Ratatouille. You should always spend extra time on the hands though. Well done, splendid!!

[Chokmah]

Okay I understand what you mean , C-Mad

I hope it doesn't matter that my answer will concern XSI


Before placing the lace on her shoulders, I create a light set that had a KeyLight/Fill light ration about 1/4.

I gives generally an average contrast level between light and shadows area of your scene surfaces.

Lights was setted to give the most smooth light as possible. (I used area lights)
Later I decided to put a lace part on her shoulders.

The base shader was a blinn shader with a white/yellow color as diffuse , and an opacity map to create the lace effect.

But that shader reproduced the same lighting contrast as the skin underlying.

This wasn't exactly what I wanted : As I wanted the face to contrast with the complexity of the dress, I wanted the lace material to seem lighter than the other materials too.

So I decided to create the translucent effect that interest you C-Mad.

I wanted to do that without SSS shaders due to rendertime limits

For that I used an incidence shader that allow user to control any parameters with the angle between Surface normal and camera Z axis or Lights Z axis (or others).

What interested me was the surface normals/Lights Z-Axis option because I wanted to control the incandescence (auto-illumination) intensity depending on the lights/shadows areas of the surface .

So I wanted my material to have incandescence in dark areas of the lace surface and not in light areas, like in this example :


I used the incidence shader to control the incandescence this way and used a warmer color as incandescence color :



That effect, combined with the opacity map of the lacet contributed to create the effect you see on her shoulder

Here is the final shader tree I got for the lace :



Here you can see the parameters and colors used on the lace.
(Now I realize that I could tweak that incandescance color a little lol )

You easily can do the same effect in 3Dsmax or Maya as I know ^^.

I hope it will help you C-Mad and others users .

More will come with the other parts of the dress very soon (And so, more Zbrush too ^^ )).

Florian.

[Chokmah]

Hello there,

Some days ago many friends of mine how I did the flowers on the dress.
So I though I would post an answer here at Zbrushcentral ^^.

I began building them with too simple elements and assembled together in XSI:


Then I send the simple element to ZBrush to create details on it and generate a normalmap :



Then I create the diffuse map from precise sample of fabrics I did from my own clothes ^^. I have many scans of this kind :



These samples are generaly at a very high resolution especially for doing the bump effect on clothes diffuse map.
With these I made the texture of the flowers you can see below :



The left part is the diffuse map of the flowers, and the right one the diffuse map of the belt .

So to map all the surface of the flowers and belt, I used a trick from video game techniques : overlapping.
This helped to get the precise result a acheived on the dress and save RAM:



As you can see all the flower elements are overlapped, and the belt part too.
For the belt part, I unwrapped it like an accordion.
That way, the belt unwrapp took only a part of this texture, and mapped the entire objet.
It is the same for the flowers which were overlapped.

So I acheive this result, were you can that the diffuse and normal maps work pretty fine ^^ :



I hope you'll find that trick usefull. Questions are welcome
I think I'll post other stuffs and the body Zbrush model soon.

Have a good day ^^.

[Chokmah]

Hello Zbrushcentral .
I go on vacation today during one week, so I want to show the ZBrush model of 'Pride' before my departure:



and the face :



As you can see, hairs were partially sculpted to make me know where put hair curves in XSI, and the get a basis for the hairs volume.

Comments are welcome

I'll post another tricks on the clothes next week.
Merry Christmas to all of you.
See you next week

[The Runner]

Regarding the hair, could you provide an insight as to what you did next? I see you model it in zbrush. Do you then paint the texture on it? What exactly do you do next?

[Kanga]

Very cool figure sculpt! Lovely understated and tender handling, super. I think I miss the open eyes in the last stage. Even if they are opened a little it might have given a meloncholic effect.

Well done
Cheerio Chris

[Chokmah]

Hello and happy new year to all of you

Kanga thanks you

The Runner, I'll explain what I did next for the hair for sure.
In fact, I painted the hairs on the model first,
but then I used XSI hairs to get the result on the final render.
I'll show some details soon.

Best wishes to all of you

[CryingHorn]

Wonderful image. I love concept and realisation. My only crit would be her hand, looks strange a bit, but overall I really like it.


cheers!

[Chokmah]

Hello Zbrushcentral,

Here are some screenshots about what I did to get the hairs on the rendered picture.

As you noticed The Runner, I sculpt and painted the hairs on the female model
first.
I did this as a basis to create real rendered hairs with XSI.



Then I created curves in XSI from this basis to use as a network and generate with the hair from curve tool:



After that, I used the Hair_Geo_shader to get the result in the final picture:



The hair texture on the diffuse map, combined with the hair volume sculpted on the highres model, and the hairs from curve, are what you can see on that last screenshot. (The wireframe you can see is a middle res model rigged to deform the highres one).

I hope it helps you

Have a good day all Zbrushers

[womball]

This is a really great piece, and I love seeing the XSI render trees. Always helpful. I like that portrait like look of the piece as well.


She does still have a few flaws which are a bit distracting. Her eyelids are too wide. This is really easy to fix, since the width they need to be is the distance between the two eyes. Proportion wise, the distance between the ears at the eye level, is around 5 eye widths wide. And I think the area around the nose needs to be pushed back to pop that cheek bone out. I could draw you a paintover if you would like.

Is the curve method of hair the fasted way of making a realistic hair doo? I have never really touched the hairs in XSI before.

[zres]

woow,.. amazing work !!
thank's for the great explanation on how you do the hair,
i have one question, how did you make the eyelash and the eyebrows, is that only a texture plane ?

[Chokmah]

Hello ,

womball thank you. About the hairs, I would say that curves method, polygon patches with alpha, etc, are all fast depending of what kind of hair style you wanna do. In that case , curves method was the best way to do that to me, and the fastest, caus' there are only hairs on the outer shape of the head.

You should try hairs in XSI, they are very fast due to XSI core. The tool is very similar to the hair and fur modifier in 3DSmax.

zres, thank to you too. Yeah eyelash and eyebrow are polygon patch with opacity texture . You can get great results with this approach.
Here are the patches I used .
You can use them as you want . The eyebrown is pretty bad to me , I 'll do them again to get a texture as clean as the eyelashes one.

I 'll post next new tips about how I did the other parts. I just need free time for that ^^.

Thanks again