Skin adjustments

a short clip of the Semir's adjustments to the skin tone and additional vein placement. I'm very happy with the progress so far, just a few minor adjustments and we're there :D

let there be..

Here is the first real lighting test I've done and below it is the storyboard/colour panel i was using for reference. I've used a range of mental ray spotlights to to fake global illumination and this will make the renders considerably faster. As mentioned in the previous post, optimising has become necessary. As much as I like using GI and there is still a chance i'll use it, a non-GI setup is a lot more controllable. There's a lot more tweaking to do but I feel this is certainly going in the right direction.

testing testing..SSS

while the modellers were modelling, Semir was busy trying to optimise the character for rendering. Since we'll be having the same character by the hundred it will be incredibly intense on our memory ram and also our render times. In the characters previous state (high poly count, Sub surface scattering) we would have had trouble having 10 models in just an open scene.

One thing Semir has particularly been working on is faking the sub surface scattering (sss), for example when light penetrates your skin it scatters around, partially highlighting the near edge of that area. Above is a render of the characters face using mental rays SSS shader, Semir will try other alternatives by using utility nodes.

the reason for a face by face comparison was also to show how i want the skin texture to look. The face on the right is the current look of the character, this is what Semir sent me in an email and the face on the left is the color we're aiming for.

we've been busy..

Myself and Alex have been keeping a seperate modelling blog for the film, it was so that we could give each other feedback without making this one look really messy. http://l13modelling.blogspot.com/ this is the link to our modelling progress just to show that we haven't been sitting idly by.