First Shave and a Haircut hair test

Ok this is my first hair test using JoeAlter Shave and a Haircut. This is NOT the final design, I'm actually going for the blonde pigtails, but for now I'm happy that I got the damn thing to render AT ALL, it's super-crashy, the hair renders one time and the next time it doesn't, nightmare! I think I might have discovered a very delicate balance of settings that doesn't make Maya ignore the hair geometry, freeze of crash with a fatal error. Next step - see if I can style the damn thing.

Clothes

Mostly done with the clothes, well, I guess there's still some texture work left, but then again, noone will notice, so i just might leave it like this. Let's see, what do i have here: well, there's an Ncloth skirt that I modeled from a poly plane, then converted to SubD then NURBS and then back to poly and that way got some UV coordinates for free from NURBS. Yup, learned that technique from one of the Gnomon UV mapping tutorials. The Ncloth seems to be deforming fine, but i guess i'll only really know once the model's rigged and animated. The shirt and the suspenders were originally poly, then converted to Ncloth, simulated and then back to poly. I don't think i'm really gonna need dynamic simulations there because the Tshirt is skin tight and the suspenders are just sitting on top of it, and Ncloth is just waaaaaay slow, so i have to find ways around it if i can. Oh and i made some point to surface constraints over where the buttons on the suspenders are to make the T-shirt deform around them and not through them. Of course i had to tweak some vertices after i converted it all back to poly, since some things were still going through other things a bit. Bla bla bla, i'm such a geek.

The point is, i think it's almost time for hair!!!!

This is my first lame Ncloth test. Lame because i'm not really done modeling this shirt all the way, but I just wanted to see what it might look like. How do you like the Hello Kitty print? Ha!

Blocked out the skirt. Will probably need a more powerful comp for the shirt though as I believe I'm gonna need some folds there which I'm not looking forward to modeling, so it has to be some kinda simulation.

Shoes again

Well this is not much of an update, I've mostly been fighting with my computer to get it to render anythign at all, apparently anything larger than 600x600 pixes makes mental ray crash. Let's see, i've cut holes for the shoelaces (so not worth it, should have used an opacity map instead), made a specularity map for the shoes so now only the rubber parts are shiny and the bump and duffuse map for the shoelaces that you can barely see at all! see how good i am with time and effort management

bump map progress

Ok so I'm mostly done with the crazy bump map from hell. Now I kinda wish I'd made holes for the shoelaces, but I didn't think I'd go into this detail

test

Here's a quick test render, I just couldn't resist. Obviously there's a lot of work on the textures and materials for the chucks left

Mapped the shoe. Dare I say it was more difficult than mapping the body, because not only you have to avoid stretching, but also figure out how to make the map flow nicely along the edges of the shoe.

Eyebrows!

I'm pretty happy with the way the eyebrows turned out. The eyelashes still might need tweaking as it's just planes with transparency maps and i need to make them slightgly more irregular

Trying to figure out the eyelashes. Using transparency map for now, not sure if I like it

Started working on the eyes today. A bit creepy for now, but it'll get there. I hope :D