jklind

Inching forward

Added 2019-11-27 01:49:02 +0000 UTC

With Daisy's face weighting and skin map more or less done, I'm now in the phase where my to-do list is a lot of fairly small things. None of those things can be skipped, but most of them aren't very exciting, either. On the plus side, they can be so small that I can knock out several of them in a day.

One thing that's more experiment than progress, is the shading. I've been considering using Blender for rendering, and playing with it for 5 minutes this morning convinced me that it might be the right choice. In that short amount of time, I get Daisy's skin to look maybe a bit too waxy, bit still much more skin-like than the realtime shader I have in Maya. Not to mention, the Maya shader wasn't working, and took a while for me to figure out why.

My main focus today was her hair - finishing the model, adjusting the texture coordinates to get a nice swirly texture, rendering out a file texture because the procedural one in Maya doesn't allow for color, and getting started on its bones and skin weighting. For now I'm trying to weight her hair with a minimal number of joints, but I may switch to something more complicated if I can't get decent deformation. Or I'll just need to keep reminding myself that it doesn't need to be perfect, so long as I get it done.

Some of the smaller updates - eyelashes, teeth, and her glasses. For the eyelashes, I haven't decided yet if I'll texture them, or just leave them solid. Her teeth I'm also undecided on - I've imported the teeth from her old model, but I wonder if I should replace them with something simpler. And her glasses... I hate drawing them, but having them in 3D saves me the trouble!