HARDCORE MODELING!: 80's Cartoon: She-Ra

#81

Nice babe u´ve got there mister! ;)Seriously it rocks!!!

how did you create the dragon?

ohh… right… Skeletor is wondering if he could… you know… take her out some time :smiley:

#82

Hello Nurse! Great She-Ra sculpt. Also I have to thank you for your explanation of making feathers, neat trick!

#83

Thanks a lot guys! I’m trying my best to make it to the finish-line this time. :slight_smile:

energise: For the dragon, I started with a b/w design in PS, selected the outline and converted to paths, then exported those as .ai-file. I imported that into Maya to get beveled etc. The caps where pretty f-ed up and I had a tremendous amount of manual clean-up work to do in order to get rid of the massive resolution that thing had but still retain the important landmarks (If someone knows a way to export minimalistic, but accurate paths to .ai in PS, I'm all ears since PS-savvyness is not really among my strengths. ) Then I had the beasty on a flat plane, which I deformed roughly via bend deformer etc to match the silhouette and contour of the armor. After that I snapped the faces to the surface with the help of NEX's Quaddraw for a perfect match. From there it was simple extrusion etc. For simpler stuff like the stylized threading on the back, I just draw a huge n-gon in whatever ortho-view and fix that up etc. The latter way is much less tedious and time-consuming.

As for Skeletor’s request, I guess he’s gotta come up with the balls to ask her himself. lol

Its not much of an update this time, but an important one nontheless, should I actually make it to the texturing stage. Here are the UV's for the armor:

[img]http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc280/Tuxedoknek/HMC%2019%20She-Ra/sheRaCorsetTestUVs.jpg[/img]

If you were thinking the headpiece was a bitch to unwrap, this one was even worse. That's what you get on the downside of modeling such detail. lol

I also got started on a rough environment/base as inspired by Zephiri's painting:

[img]http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc280/Tuxedoknek/HMC%2019%20She-Ra/SheRaEnvironment1.jpg[/img]
(Sorry for the massive OpenGL display errors in this shot. I gotta remember to turn on viewport hardware rendering next time I take a screen-grab of this thing. That should alleviate the issue.)

Many thanks again for all your comments and keep them coming. :)

Naz dorovje!
#84

Damn, man. Attention freak is just the beginning. I love how much work you put into every aspect of your model, down to UV’s. LOL I’m sure they were a bitch to lay out. Imagine doing it all in Maya, though? what a nightmare. Headus UVLayout is a godsend.

concerning your image - illustrator - maya workflow: You could bring the image into Maya as a texture on an plane ( or an image plane) and draw the countour with curves. The least it would do would be to give you control of where your vertices are.

Will you be using the pose in Zephiri’s painting as well?

-Rage

#85

dang UV mapping. I don’t even know how to do them properly. this is going to look great!

#86

You did a very good job on the UV layout, model is looking great, keep it up!!

#87

This model is gona rock! Very detailed and hard work, sure one of the best I have seen on this challenge!

Hope to see it complete in short!

Good luck.

#88

Im loving the output…

#89

Oh wow, great work with the armor and sword! Really liking how this is coming together, can’t wait to see it!

#90

Awesome work man!! can’t wait to see it finished

#91

Thanks a lot guys! :slight_smile:

lol l Yeah, I’m totally anal about that. :wink:
Without headus UVL, I think I’d go Automatic mapping on everthing and use 8k textures. lol
Thanks for the tip! That’s what I usually do for things like that dragon, but I thought there wouldnt be much of a difference in time and effort to achieve what I wanted out of it.
Yep, that’s the pose I am shooting for.

          OK, update time. Here's some more wip images.
          
       The more or less finished forearm guard:
          
          [img]http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc280/Tuxedoknek/HMC%2019%20She-Ra/SheRaForeArmGuard.jpg[/img]
          
          Only fairly simple modeling and some repurposing of parts already modeled for the body armor was involved in this, but if anyone wants to see a more detailed wip image, let me know.
         
         After I was done with the armor, I was bored to tears with the way the blank white skirt looked with it and all wrinkling in the world did not make a difference. So I thought to myself, that thing is the way it is in the original design due to ease-of-animation considerations only and I should not feel restricted by that in any way. Hence I stayed with my ancient Roman inspiration (I'm such a sucker for all things Roman BC. lol) and decided to give her a full military, praetorian skirt. 
         
         Here are my first steps, with some more Syflex involved:
         
         [img]http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc280/Tuxedoknek/HMC%2019%20She-Ra/SheRaSkirtWIP.jpg[/img]
         
         This is what it looks like so far with the armor. I'll be working on more detail to go on top of that thing.
         
         [img]http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc280/Tuxedoknek/HMC%2019%20She-Ra/SheRaSkirtWires.jpg[/img]
         (Again, those are clipping/display errors due to real-life scaling I guess, not penetrations although its very tight in there. Hardware shading only made it worse, btw.)
         
         First I modeled the two main elements from a plane. Then I smart-duplicated them in exact distances, combined them into one object and deformed the result with a bend deformer. Next, I scaled a cylinder to the displayed size and shape, turned the skirt to cloth and pinned the upper row of verts to the cylinder, which I then scaled up so there wasnt any penetration between the up-res underskirt and the other elements. I made the previously simulated and up-ressed underskirt the collider. In Live-Mode I then scaled the cylinder down until the  military skirt nicely lay on the underskirt. Some collison tweaking was involved here to fix not only penetrations with the collider, but  self-penetrations as well. Lastly I cut the skirt to match the outline of the armor. This way I dont have to worry about weird penetrations here. After separating the single military skirt object into two layers, I now have three cloth layers to either sim separately or as a unit using SySkin, which, as I understand it, is a layered simulation, where the lower layer's deformation determines the movement of the higher layers.
     
        Anyways, if there are any questions and comments, just shoot!
        
        Cheers!:arteest:
#92

I think this is going very well so far and thanks for sharing the process for the final skirt :slight_smile:

I think the body mesh will probably need some more tweaking when you get her geared up. In particular to me I think the legs looked a little under-toned for she-ra who, let’s face it, is running around a lot :slight_smile: Maybe some work just above the knees at the front and the calves at the back I think.

Having said that posing her might fix a lot of those issues.

I’m also interested to see what you’re going to do with the face and it’s pose. I think she’s one of those characters where the eyes are going to be very important to selling the over-all expression. I’d be careful not to leave that bit too late :slight_smile:

Looks great.

#93

Man, those laces on the back of the gauntlet look great. I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to do that myself and that’s way more than I was originally thinking. Everything is fitting together very well.

#94

Nothing to say at the moment, except that this still looks incredible. :slight_smile: I’m definitely inspired!

#95

axiomatic: Thanks a lot for the detailed critique! Its very much appreciated. :slight_smile: I’ll do another detail pass on the body once I know precisely which areas are covered by gear and which are not. No need to finitely refine what wont be seen. :wink:
Facial expressions and eyes are always critical to a characters feel. I’m leaving that pretty much to the end, since I agree with the classic Disney sentiment that a character should sell a “performance” through pantomime before the face expresses and acts.

     WyattHarris: Thanks, Wyatt. :) As usual in CG and pretty much anywhere else, there's numerous ways of achieving the same thing. Here's two approaches:
     
     1.  Place your lace-holes. 
     
     2.  Method a): Model a curve into place and extrude a pre-modeled poly plane along the curve. Voila, done! That's if you are lucky. In Maya this kind of operation is yielding somewhat unpredictable results, but I hear in Max it works rather well. I don't know about LW, but I need to try that sometime.
          Method b): This is a bit more tedious, but is what I did here. I combined all the metal parts into one object, then selected and duplicated/extracted the inside faces of the hole-rims (for the lack of a better word) all around . Now I had the exact diameter to fit perfectly snug into the holes after smoothing would shrink it down a bit. These new cylinders without caps, I extruded on both sides and rotated the new edges in the appropriate direction towards the other side and up or down. Next I bridged these to create the threading going across the empty space on both sides using the Maya Bridge Tool, which does work rather well.
     
     I hope this helps. If you've got any more questions, just shoot!

Oberyn: Thanks, mate! I can only return the compliment! :slight_smile:

     Here's another small update. I added a carrier-strap to the armor to make the whole thing more functional and reasonably "cape-able" (adds a whole new meaning to the word).
     
     [img]http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc280/Tuxedoknek/HMC%2019%20She-Ra/SheRaBodyArmor5.jpg[/img]
     
     Also, I decided to replace the f-me boots with high-laced sandals. An update on that will be next.
     
     Naz dorovje!
#96

Man, the amount of detail, is stunning. I wish I even had the time to do half the detail of this. Beautiful.
Glad you went with the more realist approach to the boots. :slight_smile:

#97

Method A) is what I was thinking. LWs rail extrude does a good job of this… however method B) sounds like it may have promise. I’ll check it out.

Your form looks great, but the fact that your function also looks good is impressive.

#98

Thanks for the comments, guys! :slight_smile: I’m really hoping I’ll have enough time to finish this, even if I have to deliver with plain shaders only.

    Here's the wip-update on the previously mentioned sandals:
    
    [img]http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc280/Tuxedoknek/HMC%2019%20She-Ra/SheRaBodySandalWIP.jpg[/img]
    
    Steps 1-6 are pretty self-explanatory, I'd say. For the lacing I created two planes, applied a twist deformer to each with the respective pivots centered between the two planes and applied the deformers in opposite directions. Then I merged the separate planes into one object, used xyShrinkwrap.mel to wrap that to the MB Level1-mesh leg and used NEX Quaddraw to manually clean the mess up. Some more editing and tweaking resulted in what I have in step 11. I'll add some more detail to that.
    
    As usual, all c&c's are more than welcome.
    
    Cheers!
#99

Looking very kickass, man! Looks like it was a mild pain in the butt to do, too. :smiley:

Right now I’m fighting with one of the primitive chunks from my turntable mesh, and it is being EVIL. It’s really quite embarrassing. lol I’m modeling a big block, and just can’t get it right. It looks like you’re having more luck!

#100

Wow, you’re very patient man, I guess “detail freak” is not an overstatement in your case… For a simple character you put so much depth into the work.

Respect. :bowdown: