Banjo Man

[onelasagnacat]

Hi guys,

I’m doing a new post with a model you might already have seen in the beta forum. In case you want to follow the discussion about the process of creation and concepting check this thread:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?161265-ZBrush-4R2-Betatesting-By-Marco-Menco&p=893205&viewfull=1#post893205

The reason why I post it separately from the beta thread is because this is a work that has been realized by me and Justin Holt.
www.justinmichaelholt.com
While I did the concept and the work you might have seen in the beta thread, Justin did the texture and look dev using Vray.
I hope you like it.

marcomenco.com

Attachments

[Altermind]

crazy!

[Marco_Splash]

Hey guys sorry for the late reply.
I hope this answers to both you guys’ questions.
I haven’t used any specific reference. Having a mirror and a human skull on my desk most of the time has been of great use
I just purely analize the machanics under a physical and anatomical point of view, adding some artistic liberty.
I always try to devide my observation time from my work time. I basically try not to use reference for as long as I can.
Most important is to understand before observing I think. So take in consideration what DaVinci said about muscles:
muscles work as ropes and pullies. Take the fact that they always pull and never push and that skin more or less acts like cloth sliding over bones and then you’re done!
The idea of imagining skin to behave like curtains really helped me to also make sure I would keep the volumes. Once the UVs were been moved around
I would use “Project All” on a duplicate geometry of the head which was the best tool for that purpose (I will make a video of that).
This to underline the importance of using ZBrush for this process. I did this kind of work before in maya and it becomes tedious and tricky. The use of subtools really makes it super fast.
Maps are set in a similar way, but it’s how you set the shader that does the magic. Instead of using pre-subtracted maps, I use 3 displacement maps baked out of zbrush
from extreme expressions (positive or negative or corrective).
It’s the alpha maps that are going to be applied to the transparency of one displacement map comped onto the other. If you have the displacement maps one over another as layers in photoshop,
you can use alpha maps to reveal this or that area of the maps. The video you saw it was rendered in 3Delight which has a very similar layering system as photoshop has.
I’m creating the shader for Vray now so I’m going to post it as soon as I’m done with the render in Vray.
So it’s the shader that is connects the alpha maps to the blendshapes. When a blendshape goes from 0 to 1, the value of the alpha goes from 0 to 1.
Btw, with positive, negative and corrective I intend to say that the morphing motions are the ones to be positive and negative and so on. The shapes are a lot not only three. The displacement maps are only three
because they are baked from more then one layers turned to 1.
Maps are so named after the layers. So I decided that my positive motion shapes would have been the ones that would have pulled the skin upwards.
Assigning a negative value to each of those layers would get me new shapes, that due to the nature of the linear interpolation of the morph would give me bad looking shapes.
So I resculpted those “negative” shapes storing them into new layers that I would actually recognize as those which would give me the negative motion. Funny enough the positive shapes are also
ones of positive emotions most of the time!
In few words if the brow goes up I consider it to be creating a positive motion; a negative motion would be given by the same brow going down.
Under an anatomical point of view, those muscles who would pull the brow up would give me a shape with details that would be totally different from the ones produced by
those muscles who pull the brow down. Basically one pisitive shape is not a mirrored negative shape.
This is because organic motion does not happen on a line. Ok too long. Hope it wasn’t boring.

Thanks for the info! The thing about positive and negative (but still technically positive) motion makes sense!

To retrieve back your lost volume, you said your using Project All on a duplicate of your mesh, but couldn’t you use Morph Target and spare the duplicate?

To be honest I’m not sure I understand how the displacement maps really works but yet again, I never tried that. I understand that you are showing a region of a disp-map by applying alphas over it, but do you add/overlay a disp-map with an expression over the neutral one (no expression) or you are completely “over-writing” the neutral-disp-man with the expression-disp-map? And if you are “overlaying” them, how do you subtract what doesn’t change from the neutral-disp-map to the expression-disp-map is order to avoid multiplying details over already existing details of the map. In the end, do you have a disp-map for every possible morph of the face or you have only a logical selection of disp-map that you use partially using alphas depending on your needs? Does my reasoning even makes sense?!?! I hope I’m not confusing the issue here!!

The role of the corrective-disp-maps is confusing me a lot too! My guess is that it is used to add deformation to the face in case for example the teeth clip out of the face with a certain expression… but since I don’t have any precise question, I’ll just wait after I gave it a try before bugging you even more!

Thanks for your time man, it is greatly appreciated!

[rabieart]

Hey bro , such a great work from the both of you … love it
send my regards to Justin …
Mohamed.

[onelasagnacat]

@Ali: thanks bro! long time no talk how are you?

@Marco: dude I’m going to make a video where I will show how to sculpt expressions using my work flow. Tonight hopefully I won’t be late from work and I’ll spend some time in showing what the vertex movement does compared to just the displacement.

thanks a lot guys!

[stefanobernardi]

This is an awesome work, and your use of displacement maps is impressive.
I hope to see soon your videos where you explain a bit more your workflow!

Thanks for sharing!

[_FoOD]

yeah the vid is wicked man …reminds me of assface from preacher:D

[onelasagnacat]

@stefanobernardi: thanks a lot for your kind words! as soon as I can I’ll post those videos.

@- FoOD -: thanks man