I have to agree, Heather Thomas seems the perfect reference choice for this chracter. At some point I was considering her for my She-Ra model as well. Get a screen-grab of the scene where she enters Colt’s house wearing her blue bikini. 
Cheers!
PS: Totally off-topic, but since Heather Thomas is mentioned. What would the 80’s have been without “The Fall Guy”!?! I can’t even imagine. 
Snows, headfirst, Razor, simjoy, jcarl I don’t disagree with any of that. 
And yes Sim the research is very nice. Not to mention the corset I’m looking to make is very similar to those sold on slightly below board websites. “I swear baby, I’m gathering reference.” “One sec, my frying pan needs to gather some reference.” BAM!
I’ve never blocked out a scene in this fashion before. Me likey, reminds me of a gesture drawing for a 2D image. I like the movement and I think the pose is a winner.
C&Cs are welcome.
Think Again!!
No seriously, that looks great. Have you rigged the blockup or just translated the blocks around? great pose. Looking forward to following your progress.
Cheetara is a great choice. I asked a friend what they would do for this topic and their first answer was “cheetara from thundercats - she would be hot!”
So yeah, i’m digging it; lots of action and excitement to be had. I like the posing method you used. I’ve been toying around with similar for my Orko piece and it’s pretty dynamic.
Looking forward to seeing the anatomy develop
It’s been said before, but the mind is a truly amazing thing that it can see accurate gesture in a few well placed rectangles!
-That being said, I think you’ve well captured her essence in her pose. It shows agility and speed, the trademarks of a cat, but also shows the proportions and form of something we all recognize immediately: A sexy woman
You might want to try a few other poses before making a decision, though. Perhaps her foot and toe curled in and her knee slightly bent, as if she were in the action of leaping off the ground, rather than already having left it. It would be great fun trying to model/sculpt the right muscle tension in her shin area, and wrinkles where the toes bend. It would also lend a sense of her being coiled tight which could add strength to her sense of Agility and speed.
Just an idle suggestion-I’ve been up for 18 hours and I can ramble without realizing.
Keep it up, can’t wait to see more.
-Rage
Hmm, a few crits. The hands are too blocky, and the face lacks a lot of emotion. Frankly sir I would just start over.
I jest. Pose looks good, will be following.
I know I’ve said this before but I really feed off of the encouragement and critiques. I know, I’m just an emotional leech. Seriously thanks everyone, I really appreciate it.
@Geuse - No, not rigged. At this early stage of the game I’m keeping it as simple as possible. I don’t know about you guys but if it gets too complicated I typically throw my hands up and walk away. “Know Thyself” - Socrates
@axiomatic - Actually I got the idea from your Orko setup so thanks for that. So far I like it but I’m not sure if I’ll continue or just use it for reference.
@samartin, waterlilly - Thanks guys!
@Rage - You are very correct. The cones for hair looked odd when I made them but put them together and the picture is clear. When I was acting this pose last night that was my thought. Should I bend the toe or keep it pointed? If I bend it then I get all of the definition in the calf and thigh. If I keep it straight then I get long and lean muscle. Either way is good. I do like how overexaggerated the pose is in the cartoon. Shows it’s anime roots with the Japanese animators.
@Geta - Yeah yeah funny guy. Actually I finished this after the match last night so my head was a little out of it.
So here’s my current state. I’m not sure if I should model a t-pose figure and pose that or pose her and then model and sculpt. Normally I would pose and sculpt but I’m toying with the idea of rigging her and making more shots. The reaility is that I’m likely to not get that far in 6 weeks so prepose would be best then. But then I also want to nail down the LW->ZB pipeline in this project. In that case I would want to be able to rig etc etc. I can tell that I’m psycing myself out. The problem is I don’t want to end up with a hi-res sculpted ZBrush tool that I can’t do jack squat with in LW because of something I wasn’t aware of or screwed up. I’ve done that way too many times in the past and it’s made me gun shy on the whole process.
Any thoughts or advice? I am very aware of Steve Warner’s “There and Back Again” tutorial for this but I seem to keep messing it up. Anyone know if there is an updated version for LW 9.x or just a better pipeline in general?
Thanks in advance guys.
I’m not sure on the Zbrush to LW pipeline but I did come across this a while back :-
Good luck and I hope you get going within the 6 weeks remaining or so…
I’ve been having issues with my zb-modo workflow, mainly becaue I haven’t used zbrush in quite a while now. As a freelancer, I’ve decided to stick to a single app and master it: Modo was my best bet as it encompasses just about every tool that I need for the current work I do. Problem is, Modo’s sculpting is balls. It handles vector displacement, which is really awesome-I dont think zbrush is there yet, unfortunately it handles it really poorly. Trying to paint vector displacement on a 2k map is an exercise in smashing my head on the keyboard. So laggy its useless, imo.
Anyway, back to zbrush. In just a couple of days ( last night and tonight) I was able to refamiliarize myself with zb, and using group UV tiles solved most of my texturing problems. Using transpose I was able to (relatively) quickly work out a pose for my chefsmurf. I don’t know if it will help, but I’ll illustrate the issues I was having and write down what was able to fix them. If you were having the same probs as me perhaps it’ll give you some insight.
1)UVs. Looking at my UV map in modo, it seemed really decent. I had one UV map for the head, and one for the rest of the body, all meticulously laid out, ensuring that there was enough space between the edges. After about 10 sculpts in ZB that gave me garbage in modo, I tried using The gUV tiles within ZB and after that disps worked like a charm in modo.
2)I used to rack my brain trying to figure out the right settings for multidisplacement 2+3. There are a couple options available (one that didn’t work for me but looked like it could be really efficient). I’ll write down the hex code for the one that worked for me, and a link to a tut for the other one. It’s a ZB-MODO tut, but it should act the same within LW as I believe the renderer technologies are really similar (I don’t know for sure, though, I’ve never even seen LW in action).
-D32 ON, all other options OFF: DE-JBFK-EACADA-D32
-http://www.3dtotal.com . It won’t let me link directly to it, but you can find the tut in the freestuff/tutorials/general section. It’s about halfway down @ my 1440x900 resolution.
-Transpose. When looking to pose my smurf, I assumed it would be easiest to accomplish this at lowest sub-D level. This turned out to be very inaccurate. Because of the way transpose works, using a falloff on the mask, the more geometry u have, the less distortion you get. Simply work your mask so that the falloff area of your mask is right on the joint where you want to bend, then run the transpose tools. Works great. I was prety unfamiliar with these tools when I started, but it only took 15 minutes or so to get the feel. One thing that helped a lot was applying the mask while the rotate(transpose) tool was active. It enabled me to get a really acurate mask.
Hope this helped some. Good luck. Can’t wait to see some geometry!!
-Rage
In the LW 9 texturing book the workflow is about the same as Steve’s; I need to update it for ZB3 tho. My advise and this hasn’t really changed from ZB2-3 is that your Low frequency should be the displacement map your low frequency should be your normal map. If you try to get a displacement map that contains both high and low frequency chances are that you will go mad before you get decent results. Keep 'em separate and keep your sanity
This is what I made for the book. Low frequency = Disp map; High frequency in this case is a bump map because I wanted to demostrate the use of the bump map viewer material in ZB2. I think I also made a normal map… don’t remember.
In ZB 3 I wouldn’t bother painting bump maps… instead make a good normal map.
Gotta love your thread Wyatt…
…1.500 views…
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and NOT A SINGLE EDGE LOOP!!! :buttrock: LOL
You my friend… you are a charismatic person:bowdown:
Haha, why would you say that? He’ll run away now… “Too much pressure, too much pressure!”
Hurry up Wyatt, me wanna see meat!
@Rage - Thanks bro, all of that is great information. The problems I’ve had in the past usually have to do with the way you have to store the Morph Target and then I forget about it and blah blah blah at some point it gets screwed up and I get a useless model. I just found a tutorial yesterday which made no mention of storing morphs. Maybe that is not necessary in 9.6?
BTW, anyone trying to learn ZB. I bought these vids a while back Wayne Robson Get into ZBrush and they were God sends. If you check my model collection, Animals in Motion Cat was before the vids, Mary Lou Retton was during the vids and Predator was after the vids. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
@Snows - I am unfamiliar with lo frequency/hi frequency used in this context. I will definitely seperate my maps though.
@Stage - Thanks bro, you should hear me during the CGS TF2 matches.
@Menthol - Sorry to disappoint, I’ve got progress but no skin yet. Soon, you guys are ravenous for this lol.
I’ve laid out an updated costume for her. The basic silhouette hasn’t changed but the items are much cooler looking IMO.
First the boots. I thought these were awesome looking. The suede back will stay black but I’m going to color the leather portions brown to match her existing color scheme. I did a quick color correction and it looks awesome.
Not done in LW yet but it was 3am when I finished and I didn’t have the patience to make a decent render in LW. So this is the result after 1 sub-d.
While sculpting in zbrush, your base, level 1 subdivision will actually change a little, and the points can be offset due to larger sculpts and what not. You don’t really need to store a morph target. Once you’ve done all your sculpting, you can go down to sub-d level 1, then export that as an obj to replace in your LW scene. This ensures that the displacement map wraps around the correct geometry. Restoring the morph target simply brings you back the exact model you had when you started sculpting. Results are the same, though.
-Rage
Hey Wyatt, the zbrush model is looking very good How do you manage to get such nice straight edges? Do you just mask and inflate? I’ve only just started getting in to zbrush myself and find that even using the mask and inflat method the edges are not very clean.
As for your take on Cheetara, will be an interpretation? I was thinking that it would be cool if the boots were more running friendly and so would have aspects that are found on trainers for example - like the Puma Mostro and how there are little rubber nodules around the sole.
Cheers.