Small maya exercises

While setting up the base mesh I forgot to mention some exercises I did.

The hands and face are the most complex areas of the body and it's difficult to get right because it has so much going on in such a small area. Not only does it need to appear right it has to be functional for animation as well (edge flow)

Below is an image of the hand exercise I did in Maya.

Applying color

After the research I went on with my character and decided to create several color palettes until I got one that resembled "summer".
Looking at inspirational pictures and fiddling around with the color scheme designer on paletton.com helped broaden my horizon.

Eventually I liked the combination of fresh colors Lime Green, Turquoise, and Coral Red. Yellow accents were used to give the character a royal edge and because he represented summer his skin was tanned. At first I liked the combination on Lime Green and Warm Yellow with a little accent of Coral Red (sash and hair) but when I applied this scheme to the 3D model the colors stood out against each other more then they did in the design. Another problem was that yellow pants and upper body elements made it hard to focus on one area and made the design look "flat". Making the pants darker resulted in an ugly shade of yellow I didn't like, so that color palette was abandoned.

Just like I did with sculpting I began blocking in the colors to tune them and see if the design worked. The eyes didn't stood out as much as I wanted to because they are too small so I'm going to make the face brighter. I also removed the yellow trims from the boots and gloves because they were drawing too much attention away from the face and upper body.

Color Study

In Zbrush it's possible to sculpt and color at the same time. Unfortunately my design didn't involve any color schemes, which also happened to be my weak link. Most of my work it is either in black and white or done without proper knowledge of how to use colors. "Trees are green, right? Water is blue!" 

I spent a long time looking at various video tutorials on how to choose a colour palette for game characters, how colours work and read the book "Color and Light" by James Gurney. 

From the character color tutorial I learned that you should choose only one saturated color which becomes the main color of the character and is supported by one or two low saturated or neutral colors. Then there is one more color (mostly complimentary to the main color) which has the highest saturation and/or brightness and is used to create small accents to catch the viewers eyes. 

The book "Color and Light" was intended for traditional painting but it's theory applies to all fields of art. In the book Gurney talks about how lighting affects an object colors and how this is used in composition.

Creating colors from imagination requires a lot of understanding on how colors work. Tutorials help on giving you the basic knowledge but to apply it takes a lot of practice, 

 

 

Model in Zbrush

This holiday I had the opportunity to spend more time working on my model in Zbrush. I came across a multiple of problems in my model that wasn't a problem in Maya. Most of of my problems involved border edges. My hair model was built out of two separate models one was the "outer" hair which would be visible most of the time. The other part was the "inner" hair, which was the backside of the bangs and would only be visible when looking up the character. Merging the edges of the bangs together caused shader issues, so I kept them apart.

 When smoothing the model in Zbrush, the border edges were smoothed out as well, resulting in a gap between the two meshes. A solution I found on the internet would be to turn off the "smooth edges" option altogether, creating blocky lines all over the mesh. More searches didn't help and I figured it would be easier to re-make the hair in Zbrush then to spent more hours looking for a solution. The curl looked good on the design but was an eyesore on the 3D model so I removed it.

I moved around the ears and eyes a little so it would be more anatomically correct.

ZBrush

Next step in the pipeline was to detail the character in ZBrush. Because I had no experience with ZBrush I watched some tutorials on Digitaltutors.com.

As kick-off I watched the Getting Started with ZBrush series. The tutorial covers the basics you need to know before starting. It's a long tutorial but saves a lot of time in the future.

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/169-Getting-Started-with-ZBrush

And with these basics I managed to edit the face:

Although the front and the sides looked fine and matched up to reference I made, the face still looked weird in a 1/3 angle. With the formSoft I could easily add entire blobs of geometry and smooth those back out. The proportions of the face looked a little off as well. Using the Move brush at a large scale I could move features like the eyes and ears around. Other brushes I used were the standard brush, the Pinch brush for defining a crisp line around the eyes and upper lip and Flatten.

Unfortunately with all the smoothing in and moving around, the border edges of the face and hair didn't line up anymore. In Maya this problem would be easy to fix with snapping some vertices, but I don't know yet how to fix this in ZBrush. 

  

Final Product

Here's the finished model:

Tutorial lists

To make sure the topology of the model would go smoothly I had to refer back to a series of tutorials I used in the past. The serie of tutorials is created by Jonathan Williams and shows the process of how to model a female body. The same topology can be used to create a male body. The software Blender is used for this tutorials, but with a little basic knowledge of Maya or 3Ds Max it can be applied in the other 3D programs as well.

Note: the series haven't been completed but it covers all you need to know to create a body with a good topology.

The series is cut up in chapter and lasts about 7 hours:

Part 1 - Setting up reference, Blocking out shapes
Part 2 - Starting on the face
Part 3 - The Eyes
Part 4 - Eyes, Nose, Face Layout
Part 5 - The Mouth
Part 6 - The Ear
Part 7 - Finishing the head
Part 8 - The Neck
Part 9 - Upper Torso

Unfortunately the remainder of the tutorials had been discontinued, even on the main CG  Cookie site. But I found the rest of the videos by scavenging  the internet:

Part 10 - Torso
Part 11 - Arms and Legs
Part 12 - Hands Base

Other tutorials I had on while working:

Topology Overview: Male and Female Torso

Topology Review: Shoulder

Topology Overview: The Head