Princess Mononoke WIP

[Nahaz]

Looking good.

[DHGamer21]

Looks really good, I would suggest maybe working on giving her more of a defined cheek bone.

[CGmonkey]

You need to get some reference material of faces (for example Dakota Fanning (http://twilighters.blogg.se/images/2009/dakota_fanning_new_moon_new_31977053.jpg))that captures the character of the princess. The face has a lot of work left, you need to start analyzing how faces are made up, underlying bones and flesh. I'm gonna do some paintovers / analyzing when I get off of work for you to get started... But for starters:

Princess mononoke characteristics:

* Confident (analyze what makes confident faces confident)
* Small mouth / lips
* Big eyes
* Young
* High and wide cheekbones
* BIG SHORT LUSH hair (not thin ugly hair)

Anatomical references:

* The lower lip goes in under the upper lip in the sides.
* Check reference for cheekbones.
* The shoulders don't have that steep angle.
* Too big ears.
* That doesn't look like a human nose.
* Eyes are tricky, specially beautiful girl eyes. (This image (http://208.116.9.205/10/content/15217/1.jpg) is fake but shows what makes beautiful eyes contra "dull eyes")

You have a really nice start, you just need to go the extra mile now to make this something fantastic and relatable to the great work of Miyazaki.

[CGmonkey]

As you will notice, Princess Mononoke is serious business to me so I couldn't help myself to do some quick vital paintovers on the head over lunch (hope my boss doesn't see this ;) ).

Take a careful look how the blue lines on the nose wraps around in the nostril... Everything binds together by the nostril.

I will move on to the body later today.

[CGmonkey]

I wanna take the time to talk about hard vs. soft areas in the face. It's something many disregard but it's a matter of perception rather than reality -- If you think about it, or even have subconciousely it makes a difference.

If you see my attached image, it's about locating where the bone of the underlying skull touches the surface and thus makes that surface appear harder or "flatter" than round soft tissue. The bluer the hue the harder and more potruding the skull becomes.

This also applies when you're doing your texturing as well as the entire body.

Having this in mind will help you make a believable character I think.

[CGmonkey]

I just want to say I'm sorry if I criticize too much -- but I think when someone's taking the time to criticize your work it's the highest form of praise. I'm not doing this because I think I'm better than you, contrary.. I learn a lot from you when I'm doing this and in the same time giving something back to you :)

If someone disagree with me or think I'm doing something wrong, please shout!

So here goes the body part I was talking about. Hope to see some new progress soon!!

[eaclou]

CGmonkey, thanks for taking the time to do paintovers, I know they take some real effort and they will be very helpful. Like I said, I am still pretty new to this so I was prepared for a lot of changes/revisions and a generally slow workflow compared to someone who's done hundreds of characters before.

I would like to note, however, that my interpretation of her is that she is a bit more hardened and less cute, while still being quite beautiful (just a slightly more unconventional beauty - not the typical supermodel / popstar look). It's a hard track to balance, made harder by the fact that the 2D doesn't really translate realistically to 3D, leaving a whole lot of room for interpretation.

I just wanted to let you know that while i agree with a lot of your crits, I still want to hold onto my original vision for her personality/looks (and i'm not there yet).

I wasn't around a computer at all this weekend, and won't have any time tonight, but hopefully I can get a decent-sized update tomorrow night.


Again, thank you for putting so much time and effort into the crits - i realize that although they may sound harsh, they wouldn't be nearly as helpful if they weren't fully truthful. Hopefully you'll be around for later revisions to discuss the direction/problems (I'm sure there will be many more coming up)

by the way, may I ask why "Princess Mononoke is serious business to me"?

[eaclou]

Alright, hardly any time to work on this lately, but I put some more time into the face -- i think i'm getting closer, but not fully there yet.

Also, my computer is pretty slow, so I thought about splitting the body into 5 pieces (head/2x arm/2x leg). Is there a way in mudbox to mirror brush strokes onto a separate object, or hide the object that is also being affected by the brush strokes? Basically, i want to get some good detail down the road, but I can probably only subdivide once maybe twice more (1-2 mill polys).

Is it better to just detail one arm, for example, and then hope I can bring a 1M poly arm into Maya to duplicate and mirror without it crashing?

I was not planning on mirroring UV's, also.

anyway, progress:

http://www.loreaxe.com/WebPosting/face_03.jpg

[eaclou]

update on the hands: are they close enough to move onto the next subdivision level?

http://www.loreaxe.com/WebPosting/hand_01.jpg

Thanks everyone

[Lizzard4000]

I like the face! tweak the nose a little bit more and u got it^^

[eaclou]

Thanks Lizzard4000!

I've been really struggling with the cloth, and tried upping the subdivisions on her face to start with some alpha textures / paint on her face / other little details, but it seems my 4 year old computer can't handle those sub-d levels, so i will either have to composite those normal-map details in photoshop with the nvidia filter, or wait for a new computer which i'm planning to build in September/October. I'm leaning towards working on other projects for a while and waiting for the new computer while studying up more on anatomy and cloth, as i'm moving at a total snail's pace and redoing everything multiple times.

Anyway, here are two recent attempts at the cloth dresses. The first one i though had an interesting look, but didn't flow the way it likely would in real life, so I toned it down and made it a bit more boring but believable in the second attempt. If anyone has any crits it would be extremely helpful as I've been really struggling to get a good material look.

http://www.loreaxe.com/WebPosting/cloth_01.jpg

http://www.loreaxe.com/WebPosting/cloth_02.jpg

Thanks everyone for the crits, much appreciated :)