Hey there cdizzle.
Yeah, I’ve exported the fibermesh curves. At first, based on what I’d read of xgen, I had thought that groomable splines would be the best way to deal with the fur on the legs, but after some more tests with both that and the guides method I think using the guides will work nicely after-all. So, yeah - I’ll be doing that.
Ah, yea, that makes sense. This kind of fur is certainly more suited to the groom-type of XGen description.
I wish there was a mixed-type of XGen description that used the groom guides but also allowed for curve/spline ‘attractors’ to make large-scale changes to the groom that you can then fine-tune with the groom tools.
I personally have found the groom-type of XGen description to be kind of buggy and/or prone to losing groom information, or just plain disappearing sometimes. I wish you the best with this character, can’t wait to see your results!
Update time.
I’m hoping to receive both hard-hitting/Candid and constructive (IE useful) crits on these renders. If something looks wrong, please tell me how you think I might fix it, but if you’re not sure, please speak up anyway. Maybe you’ll get me looking in the right direction.
A few things stand out to me already. One that I’d like to ask about is Vray’s hair shader: Is it just me, or is it rendering individual hairs as flat planes and not tubes?
My target for skin tone has been mostly based on the following images. I might lighten it up some:
I love this, it’s really great work. Well done! 
Awesome fibermesh work.
Really great model, amazingly real sculpt, texturing and hair…
On the constructive crit side: evaluating the skin tone and other details would be so much easier if the tone curve of the renders was adjusted. They appear distinctly underexposed, with a few hot pixels in the eye speculars. Just taking the renders into photoshop and adjusting the curves or levels (or even just running “autotone”) gives a much better sense of the image.
WOW great character. I totally agree with NWoolridge. I ran an auto tone in photoshop…soo much better.
Either way. Great work. I am looking forward to seeing more of him.
Thanks for the great crit’s and the praise guys.
You are totally right about the exposure. You’ve touched on a question that I was puzzling over with my lighting setup, namely how to establish a “correct” baseline lighting scenario. At every studio I’ve worked in I’ve noticed that the lighting rig given to texture artists seems very arbitrary. I’ve never been given a good explanation for exactly what that light rig would correlate to in real life, consequently I and every other artist am left to guess how said lighting should make my materials look. I’m not looking deeply at this right now, but my present lighting was setup in part to address that question. In the first two renders below (The darker version is the original lighting, and the lighter is “corrected” in photoshop… though looking at it now it seems a bit brighter than I like. EDIT: I just did some checking - chrome isn’t displaying the colors of my images correctly though they are saved out of photoshop with the srgb color profile. In Chrome the contrast is higher for some reason. Anyone know why?) I’ve included a color chart that is textured to a plane in the scene (it does not cast or receive shadows, and does not show up in reflections/refractions). The texture was created in Photoshop, is tagged as an srgb image in maya and has the diffuse value set to 0.7. The idea was to create a lighting scenario that would render the colors on the chart so that they would come out at their original values. It actually requires a still darker lighting scenario to achieve this (I showed the result of that lighting in a previous post but did not explain it), but this one is close. Of course I’m still left with the basic question of what material “x” should look like under this light setup. These are questions I want to get around to looking into more deeply (feel free to offer any suggestions) but for now I’ll settle for making it look “good”. The rest of the updated images are corrected in photoshop.
FYI - changes include:
For anyone who reads my observation offered in the previous post that my images look wrong in chrome: I found a forum thread where this issue is discussed: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/iwpGF8K6dWc
The key point made there regarding chrome is:
"I found that unmodified Chrome will display image correctly when it is NOT tagged with ICC profile. With a profile included the dark are too dark.
The modified Chrome will display both images correctly."
That’s annoying.
Here you can find instructions on how to enable color management in chrome (this actually hasn’t worked for me but maybe for you…): http://www.canonrumors.com/forum/index.php?topic=26839.0
However, reading elsewhere it seems that getting this setting to stick may be a bit tricky. Having said that, most of the stuff I’ve read thus far is a bit old so I don’t know how current it is. It’s also something that needs to be looked at for other browsers.
For those who aren’t sure what I’m talking about, here is a screengrab of one of my renders open side-by-side in chrome (on the right) and xnview mp (yields the same result as photoshop). the blacks in chrome have flattened out (if your browser is not currently color managed you may need to download the image and look at it in photoshop or something to see the difference):
Here’s a plugin for firefox to handle color management there: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/color-management/
Oddly, for this plugin to yield the correct results in firefox I had to set it to NOT color manage any images… I don’t get it.
Wow that’s quite subtle but now you’ve pointed it out, yes, I can indeed see a difference! The blacks have flattened out. Interesting stuff. Thanks.
Hey Chimz, if you haven’t already you should download the comparison image and view it in photoshop to make sure you’re seeing it properly. That way you’ll see the full difference. It’s still quite subtle, but more noticeable than if you see it in chrome with the blacks in both images crushed. It really makes a difference with dark images. This one by goyun is a great example: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?189414-qoyun-s-art-dump/page6&p=1171950&infinite=1#post1171950 Except for the highlights, in chrome the black hair completely disappears into the background, while in firefox with that color management plugin, or offline, you can distinctly see the silhouette of the head, a faint glow behind it and more detail in the hair.
So I tried a render of this guy with stubble rather than a full beard (for the fun of it and with a mind for a second costume I’d like to make down the road). However, I start getting an ever repeating warning and the render hangs for forever. I’m wondering if anyone out there knows what to make of it. It is:
// Warning: line 1: Invalid geometric normal (0 0 0) for “Body_HairBase_Base_PT1_V1_1Shape@Kha_Beard_Style1@Base_PT1_V1_1@xgen_patch”. //
All this stuff: Body_HairBase_Base_PT1_V1_1Shape@Kha_Beard_Style1@Base_PT1_V1_1 is simply identifying the Geo shape/xgen Collection name/xgen description
For those familiar with Xgen. I’m creating the stubble by simply adding a cut modifier to the top of the stack and using the following expression to control the length. It basically just cuts the hair down by it’s own full length minus some random value that is set by a slider:
$cutAverage=0.1000;#this creates a slider that sets the value
$cLength - rand(($cutAverage - 0.05),($cutAverage + 0.1))
Here’s what came of the portion of render that did complete:
For anyone who hasn’t heard of it yet - you should check out this program called polybrush. It’s created by a 3D artist and has some interesting features. Check it out here: http://polybrush.org/
I haven’t done anything more on this guy (busy with other stuff), but I did finally get around to posing an old sculpt of a horse. Here you go:
Another something to add from an old project. I modeled this Statue for a trailer for Warhammer 40K:
The sword (modeled everything except the skull which was re-purposed from a different model). The sword was also used for other characters in the trailer:
I recently got a hankering to produce a 3D version of a sketch I did while drawing with my kids. Below are some color concepts for it. These are paint overs on top of vray renders of a dynamesh’d version of the zbrush model plus xgen hair.
Some new stuff. The color image of the dragon is just a photoshop paintover on-top of a zbrush render:
He bares the scars and the trophy.
Character art with a touch of Roman classicism 
Some truly gorgeous work here! Just outstanding!
Love your style! Keep sharing!
