For my final year project I am required to conduct research into an area of interest, thankfully I have been lucky enough to get an amazing opportunity to work alongside the Edinburgh College of Art and a high tech start up company specializing in holographic displays. I cannot mention the display technology or the company as they wish to keep their research under wraps until it is ready for commercial release. But it is a real break through, these displays show holograms that exist in the x,y,z of space, without needing to be projected onto a screen (Current 2D technology). My role in all this is to develop a pipeline or system for the development of expressive conversational agents within the holographic hardware constraints. So I must find means of producing frames and identifying patterns for reuse. Anyway due to the high risk of collaborative projects I had to develop my own model for evaluation purposes. The collaborative project model will not be completed until late march (The ECA are designing the character, I am then selecting, Modelling, Rigging, Texturing and Animating the Model that will then be used to demonstrate the holographic hardware platform).
Anyway below are screen shots of the progression through the process. The final will be posted after this.
I taught myself how to patch/strip model (polygon by polygon and connect the vertices together) and modelled a base to then pump into Mudbox...However after 2 days work I forgot that Mudbox only supports 4 sided polygons... So back to square one!
Thankfully mudbox has a base head model and building in UVW cords for it. Means all I had to do was sculpt and paint :D
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| Base Model that Mudbox Provides |
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| Started with the Nose and Eyes |
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| Added Lip Volume |
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| Eye sockets (Will add eyes later as so they are independent from the mesh and thus can be moved easily later) |
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| Sculpt ear definition...This is real tricky |
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| Carve out ears from skull |
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| Begin tidying up a bit to get an idea of how things are going to look |
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| Getting there.. |
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| Looking ok... Just need smoothed out (Also added neck and collar bone definition aswell as lowering shoulders and thinning the neck, very important for female appearance!) |
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| Skin Colour is too light! and the nose is squint! |
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| Fixed!...Ok, so I think I'm finished... Back to 3Ds Max |
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| Make the eyelashes |
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| Add the hair...No wait that looks... |
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| ....Really really wrong! Back to mudbox and just texture paint the hair I think! (This was decided after 2 days of different hair styles, colours and frizz/thickness parameter alterations... It just was not working) |
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| Looks better but still Smack bang in the Uncanny Valley! |
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| Ok back to Mudbox yet again by this point it was the 5th attempt! |
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| Add eyeshadow and liner to take attention away from naked eye (very difficult to get right it turns out!) |
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| Now we are getting somewhere! (Neck and shoulders also got altered again after this as she was looking abit butch!) |
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| I thought glasses may hide the eyes but this clearly does not flatter her! |
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| Ok so scaffolding bar for right ear, nice and easy... |
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| Crazy ear ring for the left |
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| Almost there but noticed left eye appeared stretched back, tidied this up in Mudbox, yet again! |
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| Done! (Image is dark due to lighting settings, the rendered image comes out much lighter) |
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