Female Bust

[shushens]

Fascinating!
The head sculpt I understand. But the hair completely eludes me, which is why it looks all the more fascinating to me.
I hope you will not mind when I ask you for some workflow suggestions.

[izze]

Thanks Mathaeus, I have a hair project I need to work on today. So I will try it out. Thanks for taking the time to patch that node up for 2011.

Shushens, I sent you over some information. Hope it helps. Just ask if you have any more questions.

I started another personal project that I hope to put some hair on as well.

[shushens]

Other than the right foot, the rest looks really well done! Can we see the topology please?
I have received your message and now trying to understand how this can relate to the hair that I want to make.
Many thanks for the info I truly appreciate it!

[Hirazi Blue]

@izze - wouldn't it be nice(r) to make any additional info, like the stuff you sent to shushens, publicly available?

[izze]

Yes of course, I apologize.

For the eyelashes I extracted a curve from my base head mesh and deformed a nurbs surface along it. Duplicated it two times and moved them forward. Using the Cross Sections option with Kristinka, I set the first as the emitter, the second as the mid section and the third as the target. For the rest of the head I basically followed the same technique used for creating poly hair. Just layered one sheet at a time, until it looked good. Adding a new point cloud for each clump.

The rendering time was amazing. I think it was 5-8 min at 3,5 AA settings. I had two area lights with samples of 9 and 9. The size of the light yielded different results. Larger area's = Longer render times. I rendered the hair in a separate pass so it was only the hair, some reflection cards, and the lights in the pass. I had the hair cast shadows only when rendering the head. Let me know if I can answer any other questions. Cheers.

[Hirazi Blue]

That's more like it... Thanks!!!

[Mathaeus]

Izze,

If you prefer the way in last screen shot, where every NURBS surface emits the points separately, it's not big deal to create the emitter compound that just adds points and strands to existing point cloud - you'll have multiple emitters in one ICE tree. Actually I already have one in my bag, just need to adapt it, it's a bit old.
Limitation is that you'll be unable to use second, 'filler' point cloud, but single point cloud should be much faster.

Interested ?


Cheers

[izze]

Yes I would be very interested. I tried to find a way to Group all the nurbs surfaces out name, and pipe that into the Emit Guides compound, but I am still so new to ICE I could not figure out a way. Plus I was probably trying to do the impossible. I really appreciate all the hard work you are putting into these compounds. The amount of control is phenomenal!

Just to be clear, when you say I could not add a filler cloud. Only one (Kristinka) point cloud could exist in the scene? Thanks.

[Mathaeus]

Just to be clear, when you say I could not add a filler cloud. Only one (Kristinka) point cloud could exist in the scene? Thanks.

Just filler point cloud that using point cloud with these emitters as an input (guides). For scene, as many point clouds as you wish - I can't limit this even if I try.

Cheers

[izze]

I understand now. Perfect.

[rray]

kickass modeling, looks very unique,
skin shading also looks nice, it's always difficult to evaluate if the environment is not visible

[izze]

Thank you very much rray.

[Werner]

Awesome style Izze! Love the mood, and the subtle expression works well.

I have a question about the ShapeSizeAbsolute attribute. How did you get it to work. Whenever I create it, the node stays red (without the boolean switch) and size depending on distance to camera, does not change. Is there some special way to access this?

[izze]

Thanks Werner! I'm a fan of your work.
You just have to tick the boolean switch "on" after selecting the point cloud ShapeSizeAbsolute, and plug it into Execute on Emit on the Emit Guides node. I did have problems with nodes not looking up correctly if items were located under a model or null somewhere in my scene. My set data node would work until I reloaded the scene, then I would have to recreate it to get it to work again. Putting all hair items at the root of the scene when creating them seems to be stable though. I could then move them when I was done with the hair, and everything still worked.

My scale settings are .02 at the root and 0 at the tip.


Mathaeus, I look forward to your new emitter compound. I did another hair style over the weekend and I ended up with about 25 point clouds. It started to slow down when connecting nodes, but the view port was very fast. And my render time will still around 5 min on a quad core! Thanks for the sample curve compound, that saved a ton of time. Cheers!

[Mathaeus]

Thanks Werner! I'm a fan of your work.
Mathaeus, I look forward to your new emitter compound. I did another hair style over the weekend and I ended up with about 25 point clouds. It started to slow down when connecting nodes, but the view port was very fast. And my render time will still around 5 min on a quad core! Thanks for the sample curve compound, that saved a ton of time. Cheers!

Well I got them to work, but also found serious problems when I tested them a bit more.
It seems that anything that use Point ID and Random Value Node (for example, factory 'Randomize around value'), which is plugged even after these emitters, regardless of what data is set, destroys the trickery I did to localize effect of them.

It's not good, these compounds really aren't for public release. Just to found the problem, it took more time than I actually had for that...

So for now, suggested work flow is still to use multiple kH Follow NURBS with single point cloud, or something like this one.

Cheers

[izze]

I understand. Time is very precious. Thanks anyway