{"id":812,"date":"2010-06-21T11:12:27","date_gmt":"2010-06-21T15:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/?p=812"},"modified":"2010-06-21T11:12:27","modified_gmt":"2010-06-21T15:12:27","slug":"character-update-on-tallie-hair-freckles-vertex-colors-and-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/2010\/06\/21\/character-update-on-tallie-hair-freckles-vertex-colors-and-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Character Update on Tallie – Hair, Freckles, Vertex Colors and Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"VertexHere’s an update on Tallie, that new character I’ll be using in the Clockwork Book stories. I had some adventures with her hair, which I now sort of like – it’s sculpted with Mudbox, which is something I haven’t done with hair before. I just about always do some retouching on my characters’ hair, so my goal was to come up with something that’d nearly<\/em> work.<\/p>\n

Which might be a larger lifetime goal than I realized when I started to type that sentence.<\/p>\n

Anyway, one of the things I like best about Tallie is the way I constructed her skin material. It’s based on two copies of a SymbiontMax<\/a> material ("Human"). The first skin material’s pale, while the second one’s freckled.<\/p>\n

I’m masking between those materials using vertex colors. You can see Tallie’s vertex colors in the lower left image.<\/p>\n

All the heavy lifting for the vertex colors was done by baking in the lighting from an overhead light source. (In Max, that’s done with the Assign Vertex Colors<\/em> Utility.) I positioned a directional light so that it cast light where sunlight would. That way Tallie’s more tanned, freckled skin tones show up just where more tanned, freckled skin tones really happen. I touched up the vertex colors around her throat and on her hands, but other than that it’s a pretty simple simulation of the way her skin would really be affected by the Sun. Neat!<\/p>\n

Then a painted material gets masked on to affect her lips and eyebrows. But apart from those details her skin’s completely procedural.<\/p>\n

\"Tallie,<\/p>\n

Now, I regret to say, I have to skin her to a skeleton. That’s the part of character work that I always dread. But first… the lawn! I dread yardwork slightly less than character skinning.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\"Tallie'sUpdate:<\/strong><\/p>\n

This comment interested me enough that instead of skinning the character (which I know sounds awful; that’s just what it’s called) I’ve been modifying her ridiculously complex hair material to see what kind of brunette Tallie would make. I find that I also sort of like this version, and maybe more than I sort of like the original one.<\/p>\n

I also established that the best example of a brunette (brunet?) in Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves<\/em> is wearing aviator’s headgear, so you never actually see his hair.<\/p>\n

\n[tags]thrilling tales of the downright unusual, clockwork book, 3d character, vertex colors, materials, hair, mudbox[\/tags]<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s an update on Tallie, that new character I’ll be using in the Clockwork Book stories. I had some adventures with her hair, which I now sort of like – it’s sculpted with Mudbox, which is something I haven’t done with hair before. I just about always do some retouching on my characters’ hair, so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-graphics","category-thrilling-tales","category-works-in-progress"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}