Female portrait

[Ganjica]

Hi everyone,
I'm trying to improve my skills in human modelling and Zbrush during my free time, and currently I'm working on this project:

This is the result so far. I'm not really happy with it, the pose looks a bit stiff, the hand covering the breast has something wrong (but I can't figure out what it is), and the expression should be like a happy awakening... but so far it's not :p
I'm looking forward to read your crits and comments.
Thanks for watching!

[PascalR]

:welcome:Ganjica!
Sorry this is a quick reply for now, do you have photo references to compare with?
Nice start!

cheers

Pascal

[Ganjica]

Hi Pascal,
thanks for your reply! Here we are, some references for you to compare:

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This is what i'm trying to achieve:

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I hope this is what you were asking :D
Thanks!

[PascalR]

Hey, here is a quick paint over to show what I would change, looking cool though!

http://www.cgfeedback.com/galleryPascal/head.gif

[Ganjica]

WOW! Thanks a lot Pascal, this is great! I completely forgot about the shape of the head, and your paint-over makes a lot of difference, now it looks proper.
I'll fix the jaws, cheek bones, lips etc. too as soon as I can, thanks!

[Silva Spoon]

I feel like although her breast are shaped naturally for a standing pose, they are unnatural for a reclined pose. Breast that do not have silicon in them tend to distribute the fat dramatically across the chest when a woman is laying down. So the breast that is not being held I feel, would be a dramatically different shape.

[Ganjica]

I feel like although her breast are shaped naturally for a standing pose, they are unnatural for a reclined pose. Breast that do not have silicon in them tend to distribute the fat dramatically across the chest when a woman is laying down. So the breast that is not being held I feel, would be a dramatically different shape.

You're right! I'll definitely try to do it, thanks!

[Ganjica]

Hi folks!
After quite a lot of time I'm posting some updates again. In the meantime I managed to follow Pascal's hints for improving the head (well... I hope so :D).
Most of the time has gone making the texture and tweaking (a lot :banghead:) here and there to try to achieve a proper expression.

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This is a quick rough sketch of the final image.

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C&C are more than welcome!
Thanks for watching.

[PascalR]

color map looks good! I would soften the line you're getting at the ear connection with the cheek (smoother transition), and maybe the chin could be a bit rounder , it feel a bit small and angular from the side view. The jaw line could be smoothed out as well towards the ear.
Nice work though, looks quite natural so far.

Cheers

P.

[Ganjica]

Thanks for the hints Pascal, I'll fix them soon.
I also would like to twist and bend more the neck, because in the "render" view it looks almost straight.
And I just noticed that the camera angle I choosed last night for the render sketch is terrible and it doesn't work at all :rant:
more tweaks to do then :rofl:

[philnolan3d]

Hello! It's a very nice start. My only comment would be that I think she needs a little more fatness to her cheeks. The area between her cheekbones and chin I mean. Otherwise it's looking good. Keep it up!

[Ganjica]

Thanks! OK, I'll add it to the list of tweaks to do... damn it seems the list is neverending! :D
I'll post updates soon...

[Ganjica]

Hello again,
this is a little update, I smoothered the ear conection, the chin and the end of the jaw, then I posed again the neck and the head, to make my model look more close to the orginal artwork (and to the girl on the left part of the pin-up challeng banner).
The result is now pretty convincing, at least to me, even if now I'm not very sure that the anatomy is correct anymore... at this point I don't really care... as long as the result looks good! :p

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What do you guys think? Shall I finally start with the hair?

[philnolan3d]

Well it looks good to me. In this pose her eyes seem a little dead, perhaps if she was looking at the camera. Otherwise good job.

[Ganjica]

you're right! But the eyes are still absolutely wip, now she's crossed-eye, she's missing the shiny outer eye geo, and the eye shader is the standard zbrush one. I'll work properly on the eyes when I'll start to do some renders, now I'm still posting Zbrush preview with some Photoshop rough touches (fake shadows/occlusion/gloom). But if the eyes are the first thing that you spot, means that the rest is pretty much working :D

[PascalR]

yeah, looks good, only the ear internal structure looks flat/smooth, not sure if it is a model or render issue though.

Keep it up!

:beerchug:

[Ganjica]

Thanks Pascal! The inner part of the ear looks flat and too soft because of the render AND because I've not enough geo to make it right, it's a mistake that I'm carrying with this model since I made the initial mesh :banghead:
I'll keep that in mind for future reference, for this model I'll try to cover the ear with hair :p

[Ganjica]

Long time no see... I spent some time struggling with displacement (actually a lot :banghead:) and the I spent some other time tweaking the shaders and the lights. This is the result so far:

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I've some issues with the teeth (they're becoming blue... have to investigate).
The necklace is flying... to be fixed!
I'm going to use MikeN technique for the specular and reflection of the skin, since i'm not satisfied with it.

For the rest, what do you think????

[Ganjica]

...tweak here...
...tweak there...

This is what i got:

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Hopefully, after all the effort i put on it. it looks better than before!
The major change is under the hood. The previous renders were made using GI, one spot and a VrayLight and a simple bedroom model fro light bounces. Good results, but no control... and the scatter on the skin wasn't working properly. So i turned on the "scatter GI" option and the render time became more than crazy! (from 10 mins to 1 hour with the same settings).
A friend who's working as lighter gave me some hints then, and the first thing he told me was to avoid GI and use a HDRI as ambient light.
So I rebuild the whole lighting using his hints and i feels it looks better :)
Basically is an IBL plus a spot for the window shadows and a VrayLight as rim.
I use the shadows of the IBL instead of calculating the AO and comp it later, as the results are better this way.
Very useful (I'd say vital) is the exposure control, because the skin tends to absorb a lot of light, so you risk to burn all the rest to illuminate it properly.
Since the specular/reflections parameters of the SSS2 are very basic and the results aren't satisfying me, I'm going to use MikeN technique, the tests look promising!

What do you guys think?

[PascalR]

Nice update! I think the skin looks too matte, it needs more specular break up to avoid the lambert look, adding an extra reflective material into a blend vray node (can't remember the name of the material that blends the material together) will definitely help.
Good stuff, thanks for sharing your tips here:thumbsup:

[Ganjica]

Cool! Thanks Pascal, I'm glad you like it! You're definitely right about specular and reflections of the skin. I wasn't able to make them look good, so I removed them and now I'm going to use a standard material with reflections and specular and them combine it with the skin using a shellac (MikeN method).

But now I think the most important thing is the hair, that should make a lot of difference... i'm so sick of looking at the "bald" mode... :rofl:

[Ganjica]

Hello everyone one more time!
Finally I finished experimenting hair solutions, and I went straight in MikeN direction. Loads of splines and Hair and Fur, plus a lot of time spent trying to make the style look good. Here is the result:

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A few notes:

The style is almost done, it's missing some details here and there and some more splines for secondary (or maybe primary as well) tufts.

The shader settings suck big time so far :banghead:.

The render is Vray, with hair illuminated from the original light rig. I've some serious troubles with shadows, they're there, but a way too soft. I tried to use a spot with its own shadow parameters just for casting hair's shadow, but it didn't worked.
Should I try a different pass in Scanline or someone has been able to manage good results in Vray?

Also, about the shader, the specular looks so flat and make the hair look so plastic and fake. Is there any good hint to improve the look of it?

Another problem I've got is that I have something like 40 different hair splines groups. It seems I cant share the material parameters between them. Even if I save a preset of one tuft and I apply it to another one it doesn't change the material parameters. Any ideas?

Another thing I noticed that is quite annoying is that, using hair from splines, I can't see the hair while I'm editing the splines, or edit more than one group of splines per time... it makes the things very hard and frustrating to manage. Am I missing some trick?

Thanks for watching and for reading all my complaints :p

[Ganjica]

Big efforts, but improvements...

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The render doesn't have part of the hair (the longer tuft and the back). Nut the texture and feel of the hair is quite better that before, and I managed to make the hair work with Vray. What do you guys think?

[PascalR]

Yeah I think you're on the right track, I would add some more break up on the front clumps, to avoid the very perfect look. Maybe add some subtle noise over the whole hair system, and add a few fly aways.
Cool work, keep it up:)

[Ganjica]

Thanks Pascal, very useful comments! I worked a bit on shapes, shader and added some more splines. The render time at full resolution is crazy, but it was worth the wait:

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My monitor is very bright, every time i look at the pics from work I'm very disappointed :mad:. The hair here is very bright, hopefully it won't come fully black when I'll look at the picture at work!

Still some tweaks here and there to do... but think I'm almost there :bouncy:

[Ganjica]

Hello again, after the holiday break I'm back to finish the old stuff and continue with the new. So this is my hopefully final update on this work:

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What do you guys think? To me is pretty much finished, but i'm absolutely open to any critic or hint to improve it :)

[PascalR]

Nice work man. I would add more subsurface to the skin especially on the face. Her cheeks and lips look dry to me, and I would also add some more break up on the specular, as it looks a bit soft on the shoulders. It'd be nice to get some more skin pores/cracks detailing into those specs :) A bit more sss on the teeth as well

Cool image :thumbsup:

[Ganjica]

Thanks Pascal! I'm glad you noticed that the lips and cheeks looks dry. When I played with the shellac at the beginning I added a lot of spec, so much that the skin looked like wax. So I started to reduce and reduce and reduce... I reduced too much :p
I'll try to contrast the specular map and add some more specular overall.
The teeth need some work too, now are too flat.

Tweaktweaktweak!

[Silva Spoon]

Im glad to see you still working on this! She is turning out nicely. How did you go about doing the eyebrows? Did you use hair and fur for it as well? Also, how did you end up dealing with your workflow issues? I know you were frustrated a few posts ago by having to deal with so many different versions of the hair and fur modifier and by not being able to see the hair while you tweak the splines. What was your workflow for checking your hair progress while styling? Did you use lower quality render settings while styling or rely on the viewport preview. If you had lower quality render settings, what kind of render times were you experiencing? What kind of render times were you experiencing for a final render?

[Ganjica]

Hi! Thanks for the compliments! I just rebuilt the skin shader trying to follow pascal's hints and it came out a way better, so the final version will be outstanding!! :D

About the eyebrows: they are part of the overall texture. Plus they are in the displacement and bump maps. It's not a solution I would suggest thou for a close shot, because they are extremely hard to match with hair, and the quality depends on the light. The right one came out badly because is not illuminated... Luckily is covered by the hair!

For the hair in the end I didn't find many tricks or clever solutions. I just spent a lot of time on them...

A good workflow to use hair and fur in max to create long hair (IMHO) is to start with hair from scalp, style them and then convert the guides into splines. That's a very good base. Once you have splines you create hair from little groups of them 2 to 5. So you have all the control you need to join, split, add, remove ecc.*
Copy/paste the hairdo of one spline once you're happy with it.

Regarding the issue of not being able to see hair while editing the spline I didn't sort it out... Very annoying!

Regarding the issue of not being able to edit more than one group of splines per time I didn't sort it out either... That why is so important to sculpt the scalp as much as you can before converting it to splines. You can use a FDD and edit more tan one group, but it's so difficult that the is no point...

Since I decided to use vray to render hair, I used the global switches of render panel to decrease the quality quickly to make test renders. For testing the shader, since vray doesn't support a custom one, I tested some critical splines groups and them pasted the parameters on the others.
I didn't figure out how to render hair in vray without tip fade without a horrible aliasing effect, so i ised it and i discovered that the hairs faded too early... Solution:
Root size 1
Tip size 5

The render time in good quality with tip fade is loooong, specially with loads of splines on top of each other (alpha on alpha) and a lot of lights casting shadows. Exclude the hair from the lights you don't need, it'll help a little.
Also it's better if you make tests at the final resolution (using render region). The feel you have of hair at different resolutions can drive you mad with root/tip scale and number.

The good thing of hair in vray is that you don't need to make another light rig for the scanline, you don't need to make a pass, the hair will be perfectly integrated in your scene with occlusion, soft shadows ecc.

They'll work perfectly with the dof pass but not the ao pass :(
For ao pass, I created a copy of all the hair, made the color white, unpicked self shadow etc. It's enough to make a good fake looking pass.

The time to render the final image in one single pass at 2048x1536 at full quality is around 1,30 mins (crazy indeed).

Things i didn't do that would be worth a try:

Render hair in a separate pass, overriding the rest with a matte/shadow. So you can render with different settings to reduce tender times.*

Convert hair in geometry, so its easy to tweak a custom shader (use anisotropic) and occlusion too.

Well I think that's all... It was a good way to spend an hour waiting for my transfer flight to Melbourne.
Let me know if you have some other doubts.

[Silva Spoon]

Thanks for the informative response. It will surely help me as I tackle the hair for my self portrait.

[Ganjica]

Hello again,
this time is for good, this is the final final final version. Despite a few things that are not really good and some other big issues that i'm carrying since the beginning, I'm satisfied with the final, and, most important, my girlfriend too.

Here you go:

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What are your opinions?
Thanks for watching :)

[PascalR]

Great updateclap I would just add a bit of skin texture break up on the reflections on the nose and under the eye in the shade. They just feel a bit smooth, and also add some fabric texture to the white cloth.

Very nice work, glad you kept working on this picture :thumbsup:

[Ganjica]

Thanks Pascal, i'm glad you like the update! For the skin I tried to follow your previous hint of breaking up the specular and reflections on the skin. I improved the overall quality, but I started to have serious issues with the specular and reflections on the base of the neck and on the clavicle. So I had to go for an in-between :o
I also gave up giving more detail on the fabric long time ago due horrible results :D and no one gave me comments on that, so I thought no one noticed :rofl:
Anyway, I learnt a lot with this work, so now it's time to use those skills to a new job now!

[johnseventine]

Very Romantic. Thank you for this picture Ganjica.

[sebcravoisier]

what a charming picture!

[Ganjica]

Very Romantic. Thank you for this picture Ganjica.

i'm so glad you feel the mood of the picture, thank you so much for your post.

[Ganjica]

what a charming picture!

Thanks! I'm glad you like it :)

[Ganjica]

I've been asked to give to technical details of the workflow, such as shader, wireframe and lights setup. After a couple of days of vacation from this project I opened the scene again and did some screengrabs. Here is a brief explanation of the lights, the rest will come soon :)
I hope I didn't wrote bullsh*t and you'll find it useful!

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[PascalR]

:sw:plugged:sw:

[BrettSinclair]

This turned out great. Would have been awesome if you added a bit of fur too her( not like a werewolf of course ;P) Her fingers look very shiny/ reflective. And her teeth could have used a bit of sss and colour break up. They look a bit like beechies at the moment.

All in all this is awesome. Congrats:D

[Ganjica]

Thanks Pascal! It has been such a fantastic surprise! :bouncy::bouncy::bouncy:

@ BrettSinclair: Thanks! I'm a big fan of your work, your Shia's 15 expressions work was outstanding! You're right about the fur, I should have added a bit of normal human fur on her. It gives a lot of realism on the other models I saw.
Next Time I'm going to add it for sure! I'm don't know what "beechies" mean, but I agree that the teeth now are not really good, I should have put some more effort when I made the shader :)

I'm still working on the skin shader settings, as soon as I finish I'll post it as well.

[3mm]

nice works,thanks for your lighting setup:dance:

[ulf]

great work on her ganjica! beautiful result!
and thanks for the explanations on vray and hairs!

[Intervain]

very nice - thanks for the setup :)

[MikeANash]

Nice Job man! Turned out great :beerchug:
How did you end up doing the hair ?

[BrettSinclair]

Hey Gianpietro. Thanks for the kind words :). I mean this http://www.beechiesgum.com/images/medium/peppermint_beechies_MED.jpg. hehe.

Its easy to say what the image needs. But doing it is another story. Fantastic work though :)

[Ganjica]

Thanks again guys for all your compliments! clap
For the light setup, don't take it too seriously, tell me if you think I made some mistakes :)

@ Mike Nash: I did the hair as you explained in the hair thread, with loads and loads of splines. I didn't render with scanline, but I regret that, I got so many issues with vray and hairs that I wish I did!

@ BrettSinclair: Hehe, now I know what you mean, that's right, the teeth look like those gums!
"Its easy to say what the image needs. But doing it is another story" that's sooooooooooooo true!

[Ganjica]

By the way, I spent some more time on this project, and I've prepared a little explanation of the skin material. Nothing new here, I just put together informations I gathered around in the forums. Fell free to ask, post suggestions, write critics etc. :thumbsup:

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[Eidish]

Great work , thanks for sharing the settings