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Dr. Gravitas: 4 Years of Fun, A Modelling Project Anniversar
June 20th is my work anniversary, the day I started working on this model and related projects. This year is the 4 year anniversary! Beginning with last year, I've started putting together various special pieces, including retrospectives to commemorate the anniversary, look back on what I've done, and challenge myself with some more difficult experiments.
Dr. Gravitas is the character I had in mind when I started modelling. Although the best project, made entirely in the last year, has been on a second character: Rederick. For Rederick, I basically started over, using the old model as little more than a canvas. Now that Rederick has hit a major version milestone, I've moved on to the third character, Blythe (not featured in the retrospective but the first few progress images on her can be found in the scraps. Since it was the anniversary of starting on Gravitas, I though it might be fun to go back and do a quick treatment of Gravitas with Rederick's topology.
Gravitas is meant to be tall and thin. That was not really going to be possible to get right by using Rederick's skeleton (his model is more muscular and bulky.) So, I settled for a bit of touch ups with ZBrush, reapplied to the Maya model. It has a problematic tendency to smooth over many of my details and does some weird things with certain shapes, but it one day I'm sure I'll get the hang of it.
The real test was to see if I could avoid rerigging the whole thing. I reconnecting the reimported mesh earlier in the node hierarchy, replacing the original base model node from prior to all the skeleton binding, weight painting, and wire deform rigging. This is only possible because they are topologically identical, even though Gravitas's exact shape is a bit different. The net effect is I get to cheat and not have to redo all the rigging I already did on Rederick! Real time saver. Of course, since my custom shader network is all abstracted into shaders blending based on texture maps, this also means it automatically adapts to Gravitas' different shape (Ok, so regular texture would do that too, but I just like to mention my custom shader network :P ). I then used the ZTools I saved with polypaints while making Rederick's texture mapes to repaint a look for Gravitas.
I don't know if I'm perfectly happy with the body texture map, but I'm fairly happy with the face. It could use some more detailing though. I rather like how the eyebrows turned out.
<<< PREV | FIRST | NEXT >>>Dr. Gravitas is the character I had in mind when I started modelling. Although the best project, made entirely in the last year, has been on a second character: Rederick. For Rederick, I basically started over, using the old model as little more than a canvas. Now that Rederick has hit a major version milestone, I've moved on to the third character, Blythe (not featured in the retrospective but the first few progress images on her can be found in the scraps. Since it was the anniversary of starting on Gravitas, I though it might be fun to go back and do a quick treatment of Gravitas with Rederick's topology.
Gravitas is meant to be tall and thin. That was not really going to be possible to get right by using Rederick's skeleton (his model is more muscular and bulky.) So, I settled for a bit of touch ups with ZBrush, reapplied to the Maya model. It has a problematic tendency to smooth over many of my details and does some weird things with certain shapes, but it one day I'm sure I'll get the hang of it.
The real test was to see if I could avoid rerigging the whole thing. I reconnecting the reimported mesh earlier in the node hierarchy, replacing the original base model node from prior to all the skeleton binding, weight painting, and wire deform rigging. This is only possible because they are topologically identical, even though Gravitas's exact shape is a bit different. The net effect is I get to cheat and not have to redo all the rigging I already did on Rederick! Real time saver. Of course, since my custom shader network is all abstracted into shaders blending based on texture maps, this also means it automatically adapts to Gravitas' different shape (Ok, so regular texture would do that too, but I just like to mention my custom shader network :P ). I then used the ZTools I saved with polypaints while making Rederick's texture mapes to repaint a look for Gravitas.
I don't know if I'm perfectly happy with the body texture map, but I'm fairly happy with the face. It could use some more detailing though. I rather like how the eyebrows turned out.
Category Artwork (Digital) / Portraits
Species Exotic (Other)
Size 1280 x 1280px
File Size 1.11 MB
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