Hey there folks . more exciting updates and news for you !
BRINGING CHARACTER TO THE TEAM
The Waking Hour Team and I would like to welcome Dani Garcia (Woody) to the team !
Woody is a fantastic character artist from Spain,below youll find an example of Woodys amazing work and a link to his website, where you can see more of his work.Woody will be helping us create the Hero characters in the world of Waking Hour.
www.woodys3d.com
HAIR AND SKIN
Todays update comes with two fresh renders , testing out Zbrushs new Fibre Mesh functionality and Blenders Node Based shaders and the Cycles Render Layers.
Zbrushs Fibre Mesh is a fantastic tool for creating hair and fur for your character, its grooming tools allow you to quickly and intuitively style the hair or fur in almost no time at all .Creating realistic hair that looks good and renders well inside of Zbrush itself , as with all things that look good in 3D it does come at a cost and that cost would be the poly count. I am sure that there is a way to reduce the poly count in a minimally destructive manner to the hair , I shall do some tests using Zbrushs Decimate plugin.
Below you will find two renders of a base mesh I brought in from Daz Studio Pro (Which they are giving away for free at the moment) to Z-brush , isolating the head and chest I changed the facial proportions and then sculpted in more detail using the claytubes brush.
Fibre Mesh was applied and the hair was groomed , after that the mesh and Fibre Meshes were exported separately and reassembled in Blender.I will be speaking in length about the use of base meshes from applications such as Daz3D or Poser.
There is also the issue of ensuring that the hair is animated , something that I think shall be saved for another post.
SKIN SHADER NODE
Because the cycles engine doesnt have an SSS shader to speak of , you have to combine three shaders to get a similair effect.Below you will see a combination of the translucency shader,diffuse shader and glossy shader to achieve the same effect.I have used a noise node to break up the specularity of the skin aswell as to randomise the mixing of the diffuse and translucency shaders. With a nice texture map applied to the mesh and mixed in on top of the skin shader , this should look pretty damn good.
HAIR SHADER NODE
The hair node is fairly straight forward , a spherical Gradient Texture to guide the roughness of the hair color on the Diffuse shader and a glossy shader for a little bit of specular action , you could also use a grey-scale texture map to control the shape and intensity of the specularity of course .
RENDER SETTINGS
The render settings are fairly straight forward , the samples were just boosted for most of the setting and in terms of lighting , all that was really used were two point lights and a background light with a sky texture applied to it.
COMPOSITING NODES
The Cycles Render Engine now outputs to render layers and this is the first attempt at compositing them.Once weve established a nice clean workflow for the compositing process , Im sure it will be much easier.
FOR FUN
This one is just for fun , playing around with Fibre Mesh and the bpr filters in Zbrush was quite enjoyable.
We hope that youve found this update to be interesting and somewhat informative , dont forget that you can get involved with the project on our campaigns page HERE or by simply sharing the link using facebook or twitter.
Mr.Nexy and the Waking Hour Team
