Hello stranger...

Well it really has been a while since I last posted on my blog. Last time I was here, was before my holiday to Malaysia. Then I had a load of marking to do that kept me busy for a while. So to work.... ;)

Well I have a bit of WIP that I was supposed to have posted up before my hols but I left the screengrabs so I'll go through it now.

Firstly, I realised that while the head was really coming together, there were some areas that still made it look WRONG. The eyes in the image below look like painted snooker cue balls and lack any sort of depth. So I needed to sort it. The solution was to make an eyeball out of 3 separate parts; a shiny outer, the eyeball itself that had a recessed iris and a separate black pupil modelled as a disc. With a morpher, I was able to introduce pupil dilation into the eye.

So I was able to go from this...(painted cue ball look)

to this, an eyeball with lots more depth

 

After that was done, I felt that I needed to introduce some shininess to the skin at the nose, forehead and ears with a specularity map. So here are some before and after images.

The last image was way too strong and the character looks almost wet with grease, so I needed to tone it down. As well as this, I had been curious to see if I could model a realistic ear as I wasn't entirely happy with the character's ears. So I created this...

I was happy that I could do it and I didn't feel that I needed to redo the fighter's ear afterwards, so I tweaked it as well as the texture for the face, giving him more prominent shadows under the eyes.

Now that is looking pretty good, I need to get a move on with the torso.

I'm mindful that I need to get this character completed and rigged for December. So I think that I should try to get all the textures completed by the end of August. That will give me from 3 months to do all the rigging. That sounds good and I'm looking forward to it. It seems that I've been working on this character for so long.