I'm an art student from San Francisco. I'm working on an animaiton project coded name JR500 S. It's a 1:51 full 3DCG TV commercial for Japan Railway's Shinkansen (I mean the bullet train.)
The purpose of this project is to explore the beauty of computer graphics on it's own (and my demo reel for god's sake!!). I'm not into hyper realism. I believe CG has it's own line somewhere between realism and stylish 2D illustration artwork.
Well, I love speedform. Therefore, I have a bullet train and a girl. (Women are the ultimate speedforms. That's why there are always chicks next to a sport car in an auto show!! Hehe...) The environment is a train station in the city. Hopefully I can finish this project at the end of this year.
Below I'm showing the sketch of the character, the 3D train model and the very first rendering of the character's face. This is the first time I work on my own project. Hope you guys can gimme some feedback on my rough work now.
on the girl: VERY NICE. the hair is alittle stiff looking, but easy to fix with a few more divisons in it.
on the train: modeling looks good, but the environmental map (are those trees in there??) looks out of place. Once you get the rest of the set built you can make an enviroment map from it (don't ask me how but i know its in there someplace)
Any chance you can post the finished animation when you are done? i really don't feel like swimming to japan, but i'd love to see it.
Really excellent girl... is she sub-d from polygons? or just smooth polys? please elaborate. I'm wondering how you got the texture so nice. how many faces? Also, where did you learn to make hair like that? I've been trying to figure it out.
nice train too, but im diggin the girl.... make sure you post her full character shot!
Tzakiel, thanx for showing interest. I won't disappoint you. Below i'm showing the wireframe in Maya.
The model was roughly built in Lightwave. The reason is I think Lightwave is a faster poly modeler than Maya. Plus, Lightwave metanurbs is very much identical to Maya sub-D surfaces. I used Maya to insert details on the model, like the double eye lids, and "styled" her hair with NURBS. Then I generated the UV texture before making it into sub-D. Cutting up UV that is overlapping and do a relax and sew them back together. Once in the sub-D, I add some level of details to create the seams and folds on her dress, etc. Then I tess the sub-D to a high res poly again, fix some UVs distortion and done. The sub-D model will be bond to skeletons and drive the high res poly through history. I also use the poly sculpt tools to apply what I learnt from clothed figure drawing classes on to the dress folds. As you can see, there is quite a difference between the sub-D and high res poly. (Unfortunately, the final render is not showing the folds very well. Need to set up proper lighting for the dress...)
The textures are still in experimental stages. But I got most of them down. Only a few more updates...
For the hair, I painted a few strokes with a wacom tablet and start layering the strokes. One thing is missing on the hair texture is the self shading. you don't see much value variation. That's why it's stiff. To further soften the hair, I'm going to add a thin, semi transparent layer of hair on top of it. Hope that will work.
I will be more than happy to see more questions and comments. Thank you all!!
Oh my god. I think i better redo my DG beauty. do you have refrence when modeling this character? or you only have them drawn on paper. this is so amazing. Well, maybe that's why i will never get hired, not even in the future. There has one thing that i may like to discuss tho. Is that the texture of the dress too bumpy? I mean the texture not the folds. the folds like fine and great. just the silk looking bump is too much.
Want something minor? No fold in the eyelid... does anyone care? I doubt it. But maybe there would be a very slight fold. I'm also interested if you used photo or anatomy reference... the hands are outSTANDING!
Actually, there are folds in the eyelid. But the fold is too small to cast dmap shadow. I'm going to do it with texture. Hehe... There was no reference at all... This is one of the ideal faces in my mind. I memorize most of the anatomy stuff since I took quite some drawing classes at school. I looked at my hands while modeling hers. I have friends saying my hands are... feminine...
