Human Head Experiment

[shushens]

The eyelashes are XSI hair
I kept things very simple. I did not want to go overboard with this because hair seems hard to control to me in Softimage.
I will see what I can do about the smile thing. I guess at this point my only choice is move brush in ZBrush for that?
I am trying to think how long hair and a cute cap both could fit into the scene.
I do believe there can be many ways to make a particular object look good and it is not cheating to take a quicker route.

[Deracus]

Ok...after seeing her with texture and eyes i do have some things, that i think are off:

The eyes look slightly too small for me. I don´t know, if thats anatomically the fact, but at least it looks like that.

The lips, especially the upper lip is way to uniform and straight. The texture you got there shows a good direction, but the geometry does not transport that at all. You should try to accentuate the V-Shape in the middle more to give everything a bit more definition.
I also think, that the mouth as a whole is too straight and edgy. Try to soften the shapes, make it less stiff. The corners of the mouth should also be a bit more relaxed and round.

Maybe you should also try to pronounce the fold between cheek and nose, that runs vertically down to the corner of the mouth, a bit more, as it gives the face more character and distinction.
Here are some pictures, which - i hope - show, what i mean with that.





I would also try and lower the bump of the skin a bit, as i think it is a bit too strong right now. It should not look clean and photoshopped, if you don´t like that look, but right now, i think it is a bit to bumpy.

Thats it from my side for now. I think you are making great progress and doing a good job. Keep it up!

[shushens]

Many thanks Deracus!
I am really sorry to say that I could not implement all those changes
Primarily because the way I started modelling was wrong and I had no idea what a mistake I was making.
Since I am not very good at Zbrush, trying to make bigger, more radical changes there now is resulting in badlooking meshes.
But I will soon model more heads, where I will make sure anatomy is much better preserved.
Thanks again for the precious advice.
I have lowered the bump, smoothed the lip edges both in the mesh and in the textures, added more flesh on cheeks, lowered AO on lips, lowered specular on chin, changed the shade/type of lipstick, added a little smile.
I hope it looks at least a lttle bit better.

skintest.jpg

[shushens]

final0000.jpg

Next step: Hair (finally!)

[Hirazi Blue]

Hmmm, the cap really works...
I doubted it, but it looks great....

[shushens]

This is a pretty n00b problem that I have run into. When I draw curves, they are cubic. But when I make hair from them, the hair treats the curves as linear. I could draw linear with a lot of points to get as close to these cubic curves as possible, but that really does not sound like a smart idea.

What am I doing wrong? In the help file, there is no mention of this problem. In their screenshot, the hair splines are linear, but the hair is as smooth as the curves are.

clipboard.jpg

[Hirazi Blue]

Hmmm, fascinating...
You probably have to increase the number of Hair Segments in the "Hair Generation" subsection of the "Hair-Spline" PPG... The default value is set at 10 but this seems way too low... ;)

[shushens]

Raising it is not affecting the hair in any way.
I think even if the segments go high, since the splines are low resolution, the hair will always follow them.

[Hirazi Blue]

Strange...
In a little test setup I did (11 points to every curve), raising the Hair Segments considerably (from 10 to 50)
really influenced the overall look...


From the User's Guide:

For long hair or styling that is very curly or frizzy, you may want to increase this to a value around 50 or more for long hair.

User's Guide: Hair > Getting the Look with Render Hairs > Setting the Render Hair Resolution (Segments)

[shushens]

Hmm... I went up to 30. But did not really try 50.
That is smoothing things up to a decent level, yes.
But when I hit render, oh boy...
Even Rasterizer is not helping much. Rendertime is going through the roof.
The only way I could keep it under control is by turning the shadows off. But then it looks really abnormal and just plain bad.

[Hirazi Blue]

Just thought of something (haven't tried this though):
You could try setting a "Geometry Approximation" property for the hair.
By this you should be able to control both the view and the render settings (separately)

User's Guide: Hair > Rendering Hair > Setting Up for Rendering Hair > Setting the Geometry Approximation for Hair

The other items on that same page ("Rendering Hair > Setting Up for Rendering Hair")
might be well worth looking into also...

And (not so) seriously: as it's for a "still", render times shouldn't bother you all that much, just go out and have a few drinks while Softimage renders...

[steven07]

AWESOME!