I joined the Pygmalion Computer Animation Project for the Pygmalion presentation in the Corvallis Community Theatre. This animated mini-feature is supposed to screen before the actual play.
My assignment is to animate a few shots of act 1. I am in charge of animating all of Freddy’s shots and a couple of Eliza’s shot. Too bad I live outside the country because I would have liked to go see the show 
This week on the Renderosity Front Page you will find a review that I wrote about T-Splines, a modeling plugin for Maya that tries to marry Polygons and NURBS to make a completely new and powerful modeling system. You can read the review here.
Hello again, everybody.
I’ve been working a little more on my female character. The rigging is technically finished but I still have to add some little details to make the character behave in a more organic way.
A guy at the forums showed me a sample video from the book “Stop Staring”, I think, where you would see wrinkles appear on the character’s face when he/she performs an expression. The technique could be done with either bumps or displacements, but I decided to use bumps for faster rendering.
What I did was to combine all the different bump maps to a layeredTexture node in Maya, and then I connected that as a bump map to my character’s face material. The network can be seen on the next image.
I then used Expressions to connect the bump maps Alpha output to the corresponding facial expression, so when the expression hits a value of 1, the Alpha value will also be 1. Combining the facial expressions will result on combined wrinkles onto the face. Click to watch the sample video.
Any downsides using bumps instead of displacements? As you know, displacements generate actual surface tessellation and deformation, while bumps don’t. This means that, though wrinkles will show when using bump maps, they won’t be seen on profile shots since bumps don’t deform the geometry.
Well, I’ve been messing around a little bit more with hair. I didn’t like the previous hairdo so I changed it to a completely new style. This hair was originaly meant for my anime girl but I decided to try it on my digital woman.
I divided the hair rendering on 3 different layers: shadows, base color and translucent highlights. I then added it on top of my woman’s render layers. The result is what you see on this video.
For the next stage I had to add some clothing as well I rendered a clothing layer, using the body as a “mask”, and then layered it on top of the nude woman render. It’s a good start, I think.
I’ve been doing some hair tests for the digital characters. I got the shading right but this hairdo is horrible, LOL. You can see the resulting animation here
I got the look ok for static renders but I still had to test how the skin would behave with a moving camera. I rendered a turntable of the model and I used the lighting HDRI as a background image so I would be able to compare the lighting with the background. Below there are some screengrabs of the animation:
The animation can be viewed here.
The woman is a Poser. The background is an HDRI found at Paul Debevec’s website.
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