This is just a quick update on Mariana, the character for the ghost short film that I wrote (titled The Tormented). BTW, this was also written with Windows Live Writer. Very simple and nice app… but it sems that the video thing doesn’t work!
I changed the texture and skin shader a little bit, so even if she doesn’t look photoreal, she looks nice (to tell the truth she would look horrible if she were photoreal).
For the skin shader I am using 3 different maps, one for color, one for dermal SSS and a bump map. The next image shows a CU of the face.
As you may notice the body lools a little bit different as well, since I made her more “curvy”, in order to add some “sexyness” to her.
I am still missing the rig…
Below you can watch a video that I uploaded where you can take a “closer look”, although streaming video is not that great so in the end the images will play a better role 
Sorry for the direct linking instead of embeding. I am still figuring out how to embed video here (from youtube, at least… I’ve done it from CGShare before), and the so-called “special tags” from Wordpress don’t work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9BL88Nh948
Hullo,
Long time no see. I’ve been working a lot on my publications (you can see the full list from the right menu) and also on some other stuff including the new short film, a couple of “proof of concept” demos and 2 websites (plus my studio site, heh). Anyway, I had been thinking on putting a tatoo on Arianne for quite some time, and I finally got to do it… As a matter of fact I put 3 of them, not 1.
The first one is a butterfly, the second one is a low-back flower and the third one is a japanese symbol that means “love”. It seems to me they fit her very well :p
BTW, I also made some changes on her skin shader, again…
BTW2. I am hoping to post the first short film character next week.
Using Maya 8’s new SSS capabilities, I decided to rework the way Arianne had to be rendered. The character remains pretty much the same, save for a few modifications on the rig and character itself.
The new shader uses a very simple layered shader with a SSS color map to define the color of scattered light along her body (to simulate the blood underneath scattering the light and all that). Although the method is really simple it proves to be very efficient. On top of that I added a subtle fresnel effect.
The character-rendering part of the pipeline didn’t work so well so I had to go back and check what was wrong with it. It turned out that the environment was making the skin too hot, yielding this “sunburn skin look”. I desaturated the IBL map and then I created another light dome using the new IBL map.
As you can see, the resulting image was a more accurate and uniform skin. I also made some improvements on the hair rendering. I daresay this new system is ready for animation
You may or may not know (most likely you don’t) that I am in the process of producing another short film. This time around I plan to use the “fancy stuff” when it comes to lighting and rendering, however I had to make a “proof of concept” just to know that the pipeline that I had planned would actually work, so I made this little test.
I figured that the best way to test the pipeline was with an actual shot of the film, so I made a motel room that appears on the opening of the movie. I dressed it using some free props that I found at Turbosquid and then I rendered the scene using GI. The second part consists on creating a panorama of the scene so I can lit my character with it.
Using the LatLong Mentalray lens shader I rendered the panorama on the image above. I then used that as an IBL pass for my girl. Using HDRShop and the LightGen plugin I also made a 26-light dome that I used for a diffuse pass. After rendering layers upon layers of skin effects, I reached the image below. For part two of my test I will animate her delivering a couple of lines.
I’ve been working a little more on the character tests. For the first scene of the shortfilm that I will begin producing soon, I need my character (Marion) to wear some semi-transparent sleepwear. My tests so far included only “solid” clothing so I had to test if the semi-transparent clothing would actually work on my current skin shading pipeline.
Since I had this file already setup in Maya I figured I could just test the same figure using semi-transparent shaders for the clothing. I rendered a first version using a plain value for the transparency and the result is on the image below.
I then used a ramp texture to drive the transparency so that it would resemble those lingerie sleepwears. The next image shows what I got this time.
As a final test, I rendered another turntable video using the same setup as for the last image (no hair or background were included on this video).
Right now I am working on a “proof of concept” for the film. I will be using different light setups for my rooms using GI and all that, and then I will work on a technique to lit my characters using the surrounding envoironment. I don’t expect to have anything by next week, though.
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.
Continuing with my lighting experiments for my skin shading, I’ve been experimenting with Image Based Lighting using HDRIs. One can easily use a Final Gather setup to get the “lighting” but the result is only as good. That’s why I decided to mess around with the ibl node instead.
The image above shows the ibl sphere surrounding the “scene”. According to what I read, there is a problem with most HDRIs and their gamma values, so one has to use this “gamma correction” node in Maya to make the IBL lit the image correctly. For this particular scene, I used a gamma setting of 8 on the three channels. The higher the value the lower the lighting values. The default value of 1 always renders a completely washed out image!
The final image shows a render test using the default “crappy shadow and anti-alias” values. I can even decide wether to render a completely diffuse or specular image directly on the node. Layering renders anybody? 
I changed the texture and skin shader a little bit, so even if she doesn’t look photoreal, she looks nice (to tell the truth she would look horrible if she were photoreal).
