If you have visited the publications page you will see that I wrote a review on a plugin for Maya called “cgMuscle”. I became very familiar with the plugin while I was testing it and I realized it would prove very useful for my characters.
After doing some pose tests with Marion, I realized I had to get smoother deformations in some areas, so I figured I could get those deformations with muscles. The cgMuscle skin deformer is not ready yet, so making a full muscle system would not be very practical. Being said this, you will understand why I decided to create only a few muscles for her. The image below shows what I have so far 
What’s so good about this system is that I will be able to simulate stuff such as breast and butt jiggle and muscle expansion, skin stretching and all that kind of “organic stuff”
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 modeling an anime girl that will be my website’s “hostess”. The base figure is already modeled, UVed and rigged but she still needs some clothing. Since I plan to use her for a variety of projects, not only for my website I plan to make different kinds of clothing for her. The first outfit is a plain and simple gstring bikini.
The second outfit is some sort of lycra suit or something like that, like the one of DOA’s Helena. This suit is not finished yet but you get the idea of what I am after. I still have to model 2 or 3 more outfits and then she will be ready for animation.
As you can see, my modeling method of choice is box modeling. I find it to be more intuitive and friendly than NURBS or SubDivs. Next time I will post about skin shading and hair.
