Raes Finished

Here are the final pictures of Raes completely finished, and a nice turnaround to go with it :).

Raes Finished Draft

Raes has finally been finished, well atleast the first draft anyway. Here are a few pics of the near finished product using Hardware Rendering in Maya.

And here are some cooler pics of Raes in Mudbox, fully textured. Unfortunately the transparency of the weapon is unable to be picked up in Mudbox.

Raes Textured

After 20 something layers and a lot of work Raes has really began to look like a character. There were some pretty cool techniques I used in order to texture her.

 For example, when I was making the t shirt, because I wanted to include the lines you would see if looking at a real t shirt, I transferred my map into Photoshop. In Photoshop I used the original colour that I had painted in Mudbox and overlayed white cotton lines over the section of the top. I then began to play with the blending until the T shirt carefully blended with the cotton lines.  Below is the process.

Process of adding additional textures

Resulting texture

Another interesting thing I had to learn was to texture a face. I did not like the reference images I was using,because the women had too many spots and bumps, therefore I decided to create my own. Unfortunately I don't have an exact play-by-play as to how I created it, however I will try my best to explain with what I have.

 Each picture below represents a different phase in texturing her face.

Image 1: Base
Image 2: Highlight/Makeup
Image 3: Shadow
Image4: Eyebrows

The below images are a series of beauty shots of Raes taken using the "Thriller" lighting setup in Mudbox.

For the thigh guards I wanted the marking to appear broken up, in order to give it this look, I used a set of scratches brushes I had found on the internet,(www.env1ro.deviantart.com), and began painted them into Photoshop to be used in Mudbox. As the markings were on a separate layer, all I then had to do was carefully paint over the markings using a stencil in order to make it appear that the markings were becoming worn away.

Raes Base texture

In order for my textures painted in Mudbox and for my normal map to be applied correctly to Raes I had to recreate the base mesh. Using Topogun, I inserted the original mesh I had made when I first started Raes, imported the high resolution model underneath and moved the vertices accordingly to match the new shape that Raes has taken. Luckily for me, as I hadn't drastically moved Raes or enlarged any portion of her body, it was just a matter of small tweaks to the face and hands. The below image is what Raes will look like with the normal map applied to it.

Subdivided

The layout of vertices over the mesh

Unfortunately due to the fact that I had previously not painted Raes when I was creating concepts for her,I had to map out the colours of what she will look like in Photoshop. In order to do this I took a screenshot of Raes in Mudbox using the non-photorealistic filter, placed her in Photoshop, and began slowly testing different colour schemes until I found one that worked.

I then began to quickly map out the colours I had chosen on Raes in Photoshop onto my mesh in Mudbox, and found out quickly that there was almost too much red and black. In order to break up the colours I decided to add a brown to the shorts and thigh guards, using a darker colour for the guards in order for the shorts to stand out.

Sculpting the hands/ New Head(again)/New hair

Sculpting hands, and making them look right is incredibly difficult, I'm actually contested as to whether it is harder than the head. I have managed to get the shape of the hands as seen from the front/back/side, after hours of trying to get it looking to scale. Also sculpting the nails of the hand also proved quite a challenge. I had to go up 6 levels, use a hand stencil I made, sculpt in the nail then refine it further. To be truly honest I'm still not convinced its right, and intend to go back and change it at a later date.

I have once again done some work on the head, mainly because I inserted new eyes in, so I figured I should rework the eyes to make it fit correctly. She appeared to be really surprised with her huge eyes before, so I have thinned them.

Before

After

More after

After playing around with the settings just now, I decided to have a "best of both worlds" and decided to go with something in the middle between the two. Surprisingly she now looks very feminine(my perception may change in the coming weeks so be prepared).