Nyeng!

A diner needs more than just bar stools -

With Daisy almost complete, I’m now making a list of various diner-centric items to model.  Fortunately, one of them was already modeled, and only needed to be shaded - a bar stool.

Before I started on the shader, I wanted to be sure that the stool was the right scale.  And it was, at least if it was meant for a doll house.  Figuring out the proper scale ended up being a more difficult that it needed to be.

After some quick research, I found that these stools are typically around 30 inches tall.   But since my characters aren’t modeled in real-world units, how do I find the proper scale?  Excluding her hair, Daisy stands roughly 19.5 units.  With a little math, it shouldn’t be too difficult to convert that to inches or centimeters…  if I were able to make up my mind on just how tall she’s supposed to be.

Thinking back to the last time the character’s scale was an issue, I started out by assuming her height is 3 ft. 8 in., but just to be safe I also did the math with her height at 3.5 ft.  After too much time spent on bad math, and even confusing things further by bringing Mary into the mix, I finally settled on Daisy’s height being 3.5 ft. With that nailed down, the stool could be resized -

Sure, I could have eye-balled it, but doing that has caused me enough problems already…

One more quick demo of some of Daisy’s face controls -

I’ve added a couple more lip shapes, but the big thing here is the pupil controls.   When I was using a modeled pupil, scaling it and focusing the iris was pretty simple.  I think only two or three blendshapes were needed.  But since Daisy’s pupils are projected maps, the same effect is a little more involved.  The final node network isn’t all that complex, but figuring out how to put it together was exhausting, mentally.

Unless I’m missing something, my task list is now down to two items - corrective blendshapes, and cleanup.  Thought it still might be some time before I post any final renders…  I still need to model some props, and maybe an environment.

Daisy’s face rig is finally coming together -

I think whenever I upgrade Maya, I’m also going to invest in The Setup Machine and Face Machine…

It seems Mental Ray can render transparent alphas, after all.  I wasted so much time trying to get a proper alpha on Daisy’s glasses, that I didn’t even bother to mess with megaTK’s opacity on the eyelashes.  Once I realized it works the way it should, I went ahead and painted an eyelash map -

It could still use some tweaking, but I think it looks a lot better than just the solid geometry.

I thought I might catch a break with the eyelashes, by just using textured polygon strips.  Then I remembered that mental ray won’t render a proper alpha channel.  I modeled the strips anyway, but I’m not even going to worry about texturing them -

Aside from making them a little shorter, I might try to create realistic lashes as geometry, and use this version as a wrap deformer.

Unless I’m missing something, I think the only things left are textures and shading for her shoes & socks, roll controls for the feet, face controls, and some corrective shapes.  Pretty soon I’ll have to figure out just what the final image will be…

Daisy’s shoes and socks are finally skinned, which means that now the only things left are little odds and ends.  A lot of them.  One of those things is the buttons on her shirt, attached with rivets -

I also modeled a tongue, though I’m curious how far I might be able to get without having to skin it.

My biggest annoyance right now is shading.  Since she’s gone through so many revisions, some of her shaders had to be pulled from older files.  Everything seemed to be going well, until I did a test render with the output passes enabled.

The beauty pass turned looked fine, until I saw the alpha channel -

Even with custom alpha channels enabled in the render settings, Mental Ray refuses to render a transparent alpha for her lenses.  Searching for a solution online didn’t turn up anything, either.

Things got a little weirder and a lot more frustrating when I loaded the passes into Photoshop -

First of all, I have no idea why her hair is yellow in the ambient occlusion image.  Her glasses are a bigger problem, though.
The only layers I wanted her lenses to render out were specular, reflection, and refraction.  But I didn’t expect them to render black in all the other layers…  I was expecting everything behind them to be visible.  Since I prefer to adjust the layer blending in post, having her eyes only visible in the refractions kinda throws things off.  Even if I get rid of the lenses, this could still be an issue, because I use the same shader for the out layer of her eyes.

Once again, her pupils are causing me problems.  Because of the modeled pupils, I added extra, slightly larger spheres to handly the reflections.  But because of the issues I ran into with the glass shader, now I’m back to experimenting with projected pupils.

Problems like the one with Daisy’s eyes really annoy me…  with all the other things still left to do, problems like that suddenly become top priority, which for me usually means at least a day will be wasted trying to solve the puzzle.

After playing around with the shaders and projectors, I may have found a way to keep the old eyes.  The first step was to create a spherically-projected black & white ramp, with no color interpolation.  The color positions and the projector were then adjusted so the front of the eye would be white, changing to black just beyond the eyelids’ max. range.

While this map will be connected to the shader’s opacity, an extra step needs to be taken for the shadows.  On its own, Mental Ray will ignore the transparency, and render the shadows on the surrounding objects as if the eye were still visible.  Connecting the ramp to a shadow shader (p_shadow_transparency) fixes this nicely.

Now for the really stupid part…  after spending this much time on a problem, it seems there’s always something stupid I’ve overlooked.  Sure enough, once I finished assembling the shader, I noticed that the roof of her mouth is actually at least half an inch above the top of her gums.  After pulling the geometry down her eyes still poke through, but now it’s much easier to correct the problem with a lattice deformer.

…she has balls in her mouth -

Lame joke, and an unexpected side-effect of her design.  Like many cartoon characters, Daisy’s eyeballs needed to be big (like the size of oranges).  I only realized they were visible through her mouth because of two things - 1.) Until now, her eyes weren’t even attached to the rig, and 2.) before I added her teeth, I had no reason to look inside her mouth.

Right now my options seem to be limited.  Aside from the pupils, the eyes don’t have a lot of detail, so a simple lattice deformer doesn’t work that well, and the sculpt deformer pushes and stretches the geometry a little too far, even with the lowest settings.

Of course another alternative would be to swap out the spheres for non-rotating surfaces, that won’t poke through into the mouth -

The only downside to this is that the pupil will need to be a projected map, which could make expanding/contracting the iris difficult.

I’m a professional.  Now, there are some hobbyists out there that do absolutely stunning work, so stunning that it’s almost criminal that they aren’t being paid to do what they do.  In fact, there are plenty out there that could whoop my ass without trying too hard.

A key difference between hobbyists and professionals is experience - a hobbyist would love to make a decent wage off their work, but they most likely lack the experience needed to back up their demands.  A professional, on the other hand, has the experience, and so is in a much better position to negotiate.

I feel like pointing this out because of an odd misunderstanding, that’s been festering in my mind for the past day or so -
I’ve never been asked to do an art-trade before, but I assumed I knew how it worked, just from the wording - two artists exchanging pieces of art, which I also assume are created with roughly equal amounts of effort.  Maybe these artists normally do commissioned work, but agreed to a trade just to make things easier.  Maybe they simply admire each others work, and/or want to make connections.  Maybe they’re both just really nice people.  Whatever the case, I imagine it’s meant to be a reasonable exchange.

But suppose one of them were asked to produce a 3D render, with custom-built characters, full texturing and lighting, etc., while the other does a traditional, pencil & paper sketch…   call me crazy, but that isn’t anywhere near reasonable, it’s insulting.  I don’t care how talented the guy doing the sketch may be, or what their usual rates are.

A sketch can take anywhere from minutes to hours to draw, depending on the complexity.  Maybe a day or more if it’s super-detailed, or requires a lot of thought.
In 3D, posing a character can also take minutes or hours.  Setting up the lights can take hours more, and the actual rendering can take several hours or even days.  And that’s on top of the MONTHS that it can take to build, rig, and texture each character in the scene.

Even if I just happened to already have all the characters and objects built and ready to be posed, the time it would take to produce a decent render would still be more than it takes to produce a sketch.  And using those characters to fill anyone’s request would also depend on the subject matter - if I think the subject is inappropriate, insulting, or just flat-out wrong for my tastes, then I’m not going to do it.

That’s not to say I’m not open to requests, just as long as I don’t have to build anything that I normally wouldn’t.

And commissions…  just be warned that I may charge an industry-standard hourly rate.  And for an image of two custom-built characters interacting in any sort of environment, the final cost could easily be that of a new motorcycle, or even a small car.