Pregnant Elizabeth

One of the characters in my thesis is Pregnant Elizabeth. She symbolizes the typical reproductive duty of women.

As you can see, she is missing some shoes. Therefore, the saying "barefoot and pregnant" fits.

This is a basic mental ray render with camera light. That is why the hair doesn't have any shadows!

Animatic v2

I've uploaded a new animatic for your review.



It is dramatically different from the first, but I feel the first was much too complicated. This is a simple animatic (just over a minute!), and the basic message is still there.

What do you think? Does it make sense? What is your opinion? I would love to hear it.

Animatic v1

Below you will find the first draft of the animatic for my thesis. This is to give you an example of what the story is going to be. It is a work in progress.



Things to note:
1) The eyes didn't render, so I painted them in.
2) These are screen captures. I plan to paint the color pallet on them.
3) Every frame is 3 seconds so timing is not accurate.
4) I created this to see if people understood what was going on.

My next step is to create a 3d animatic, with transitions in mind.
Any suggestions/ideas/comments, are always appreciated!

Hair Dynamics - test

One of the tricky parts about hair is the way it moves. Maya dynamics is great, but sometimes it can act a little finicky.

After some tests, I decided to add 2 hair elements. In the example below, you can see two different color hairs reacting differently. I wanted to test and see if changing attributes made the hair more dynamic and realistic.

The example also shows hair that is in a bun, and then falls, which is part of my thesis animation.



Comments always appreciated.

Composite: Bride

Here is a composite of the bride. The renders are in 3 render layers: beauty, hair, shadow. Still needs some tweaks but the idea is there.
Comments always appreciated!

Hair

Hair is an essential part of a 3D model. It can tell you so much of the character's personality, wealth, culture, so on. This is also a very tricky and I know very little about creating hair in Maya.


This is the final with some tweaking still needed, but the essential color/form is demonstrated.

In this blog I will demonstrate my errors and success in creating hair.

This render is an example of polygon hair. I played with it for a while, and realized that it was going to hurt my piece more than help it.



Therefore I did research on Maya Hair, did some tutorials, and voila. Much more convincing hair, though it looks very much like 3D instead of beautiful hair.





I added more hair to give the character a lot more volume. This is for the bride. I didn't want her hair to be blonde and I don't like straight hair, since it just looks too perfect.




I finally tweaked the hair parameters, and received this effect, which I am pleased with.

The next hurtle will be Dynamics, as well as tweaking the shadows.

wedding dress DONE

The wedding dress is finally complete. I used a phong with the 90* spec to produce a lovely shimmer to the wedding dress.




Next: Hair!

water test 1

Part of my thesis involves particle simulation. This will be used to create the blood that will flow on the character.

I am using the program RealFlow. I created this scene as practice.



I see a lot of issues! One is render time. This scene took about 30 minutes to render in RealFlow. It is only 40 frames.
Also, the poly count is very large. (this small amount of liquid has over 5000 polys).
Furthermore, I am not sure how a moving character will import in RealFlow, so more research in involved.

Nonetheless, RealFlow is a powerful program and I look forward to working on it further.

Wedding Dress Con't

I am continuing to work on the wedding dress, and due to some happy accidents, I've discovered how to create lace. I worked on it through color, bump, spec to no avail. Finally I removed all color and just used Bump, which gave the render the subtle details lace creates.
(please click on image for a larger render)



The dress isn't done yet! I still need to make the specularity more interesting.



I added strong spec on the flowery parts of dress, to bring them out more, and make the dress more interesting.

In this render I was using phong as spec to try to get the 90* effect it has. Didn't work quite as well. I need to continue working on it.



I added the spec to the glow, and got some crazy results. This effect doesn't work on my project, but it is an interesting 'angelic' look. Maybe for something else.

That's it so far! Next more spec and after that, the hair!

Wedding Dress Con't

This blog will update the reader on the progress of the wedding dress.

I have UVed the dress and is now texturable. I am working on tutorials in BodyPaint. My goal is to learn the program, create 'brushes' that I can use to draw details on the dress, and render it. There were some bumps in the way such as BodyPaint takes some practice to get use to, especially the results of BodyPaint differ greatly from Maya renders.




The bump is excessive in these renders. I had to continue tweaking the shader for better results.



In these renders, the lace is finally starting to look more like lace. The dress still feels like a blinn, so I will continue to work on that as well as more details on the dress.

Any comments will be greatly appreciated! Thank you.

To nCloth or not to nCLoth, that is the question

One of the current hurtles I have to solve, is my character's clothes. There are several outfits in my thesis short, and this post will focus on the wedding dress.

I am using nCloth for the wedding dress. I have studied several tutorials to figure out the best way to create an nCloth dress that has materialistic properties of a wedding dress; in this case chiffon, corset and veil.

My first idea was to create just the dress and texture the character's torso. After trying several trials and errors, the same problem occurred. The geometry would a) float around her waist or b) weld on her verticies, but have problems with interlacing geometry. An example render is below.


Therefore the next solution was to create the whole dress herself. Since wedding dresses are usually drapped on, (and I know this due to my costume design background experience) I also drapped the new dress. I took the geo from the character, duplicated it to make a tight fitting bodice, smoothed it out, and added the dress. Below is an example of the dress.

The next step is to UV maps it, texture it, and nCloth test it.

Any comments always appreciated. Thanks!