EDIT: DROPBOX SUCKS. Pretty much all images broken until page 5.
So, another one of the things I've been wanting to do is to create a steampunk-type girl. A simple image search for steampunk clothing -- especially feminine stuff -- turns up such beautiful designs. These are some that I found on some Pinterest boards; still scribbling together an initial design for the clothing, but I imagine it'd be pretty similar to some of these. <3
I really like the overall costume of the first one. The second's hair+gogglehatthing is soooo cute. The third has some cool belt stuff, and I'm thinking of whether it makes sense to do some kind of tulle-based skirt like that, but still deciding whether it'd match. And in the last one one kind of reminds me of Gadget from Rescue Rangers, but with a musketgunthing instead of a wrench. :P
Also got a sculpt going of the girl; so in theory all I've got to do is get the clothing done. :) Then I'll retopo, rig+pose, put it in a game or something. :D Her anatomy isn't super perfect or anything, but I don't mind so much because it's close enough, and like 85+% of her will be covered up with costume anyway. I was kind of struggling with her overall build. Wanted something that was attractive, but not unrealistic. I imagined her to be something of a scout-type character, so opted for a build that's fairly light, but with more muscle in the legs. Always got to be careful with women though, end up having to smooth the muscles away, otherwise they start looking kind of roidsy.
Also, this. :P
After this, wanna do a super stylised man, so I can go crazy on muscles and stuff; but I should probably try finishing stuff sometime. :P
There's also this that you might remember. Decided the composition worked better landscape than portrait, but it's kind of on the backburner now.
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Thanked by 1shelton
Comments
@Elyaradine - my personal experience has been that stepping away from a project for a while is a good thing, but not having more than about 3 simultaneous projects (design, programming, concept, whatever) is equally as important.
When I'm disciplined about this it means I always come back to finish stuff.. even if it turns out to be a dud.. which almost always ends up teaching me something about the process. This not following through with stuff is a real problem for a lot of us I suspect.
Anyway, I digress.. will be cool to see where you go with this.
I'm going purely by subjective aesthetics here, but I've always thought of steampunk as having a distinctly Victorian or 19th century look to it.
The model looks fantastic, though those censorship stars are a bit funny... is it really necessary to censor what isn't even real nudity? I'm just asking cos I find it very strange how people never bother censoring graphic violence.
Saw this strange workflow recently where you block in your hair using the hair sim stuff (because it provides a fairly nice interface for "sculpting" hair), then use the splines to create the hair cards. I'm not sure how well it'd work for complicated hairstyles (like complex Victorian hairdos/braids), but I'm giving it a go with a simpler, shorter hairstyle.
May still put the goggles in the hair. :)
I'll post better turnaround stuff when I'm done. Leaving for rAge now. Hoping to get the fragment done tomorrow, so I can start on another version with female-fatty bits to do during the week. :P
I'm finding it super hard to do -- even though I'm somewhat confident with what muscles are actually there, and I've drawn them before, making them the right form and volume is quite a struggle. At least I feel myself growing! :)
Did a female version too, but there are a bunch of things I want to fix if/when I get a chance. :)
Also did the female:
And my current wip:
Cool sculpts! I would have made one side then mirrored the other side but that wouldn't look nearly as good (naturalness is asymmetrical)
Do you do these off anatomical references?
And yeah, I've got some really awesome reference for the course. The models get sprayed with oil, then lit in a way that highlights their forms, and they're photographed from eight angles, so there's plenty of information.
Are these frames tweenable or is it all frame by sculpted frame?
(Traditionally it's the boobies that usually get the arms lifted treatment, according to renaissance stuff from art history classes :P)
Each pose was sculpted (although each pose used the previous one as a base). It took forever. There are some mistakes that I can see, but can't bring myself to fix because I'm so tired of this one. (I had to redo about 30% of it when the program crashed, and I only then realised that I hadn't saved since the previous evening. T_T)
It looks like it might look amazing if rendered in an etched rendering style. I can't think of any game in fact that's attempted that.
I mean, a little like: http://i418.photobucket.com/albums/pp265/WVEngraver/line_engraving/Picture004.jpg
Though I'm sure that's not what you're thinking.
If you tried to bake a normal map from that, you'd probably lose a lot of the details because of low texel density. An effect like what you posted would likely be done with a postprocess shader. Otherwise, if some attention were given to the UVs so that their scale and orientation matched, you could layer a detail normal (or some other) map over it to get highly detailed striations.
The way I've been working is to define anatomy and musculature using a Clay Tubes brush, which gives the heavily textured look, kind of similar to using a rake in traditional sculpture. And then I'd go in with Trim Dynamic to simplify the forms and exaggerate the planes some more, and I preferred that result... but it takes some extra time that I didn't have. I'm probably working backwards to what I should. :P (i.e. should ideally do the planes first, and add the anatomy afterwards. But if you learning the anatomy, then you do the anatomy first so you know what's there, and simplify the forms afterwards, I guess. Or maybe they're supposed to be done concurrently, but then you have to know this stuff really well.)
Kudos
@Tuism: Thanks! :) I was working off of Godfried Bammes's simplifications of the knee. (He does it for the rest of the body too, and is amazing for it.)
what inspired this? I'm looking at Zbrush and liking what I'm seeing
Progress has been a bit slow, with holiday season "chilling out" creeping in, and my being away for a week. Must fight it!
Things I should address next are posing the hands properly, and doing some passes on them, and the face. I don't really care about the lower body yet. Just haven't been excited about it I guess. It's best practice to work the entire thing to the same quality, and keep doing passes over the entire body... but since this is a personal piece I've just been doing whatever feels like the most fun. <_<
Played with some lighting when I was tired of sculpting hands. :)
@shelton: Pure art study, and as practice for my next game character.
Here's a render with the back. Did the feet. While there are still improvements I could make, I'm happy enough with it as a portfolio piece as it is. :) "M-M-M-MANTHONG!!!" Might come back to it if/when I get tired of the other stuff I'm working on.
So... about that steampunk/Victorian girl I wanted to do in the first post of this thread? Finally started designing her costume! She's going to end up as a game-res model, rigged and animated. While I'm at it I'm also entering her into a competition, because the competition provides an auto-rigger and motion capture, and cloth-sim. I want to rig her face up too... but as it is it's a rather crazy amount of work I'd like to do, I'm just going to do my best and see how far I can get.
Looking for crit, from anyone, but especially anyone who's got experience with fashion design! :)
The basis of the idea was that she could fit in the world of Victorian/steampunk-themed game as a playable female character. She'd be seemingly care-free and playful, hedonistic, with, fashion-wise, an obsession with polka dots and lace.
I imagined an introduction scene where she leaps in out of the air, after having hovered into view Mary Poppins-style on a polka-dot-and-lace umbrella, quickly dispenses of a small group of 'bad guys' with a few bone-crunching raps to the skull, before finishing the last few off with a barrage of bullets firing from the machine-gun tip of the parasol, punctuated by bouts of manic laughter. Finally, after the chaos she'd notice the bullet holes she'd left on the wall... and fire a few more rounds into it to finish off the polka dot pattern.
I have no idea why the hell she can fight like that though, but I'm not going to ask her.
None of this is final (and none of this has anything to do with the work I'm actually doing at Luma, just to be clear!). Just a portfolio piece, with a character I think will be lots of fun to create. :D
Still want to add a hat, a belt buckle type thing, and something at the back to hold stuff together. (I painted in some sewing stuff, but I don't think that works so well. May just go with a flat strap instead.)
I'd like to add an umbrella too, but maybe that can wait until later as a separate piece.
As more of a writer, I can't really comment on the appearance very expertly. However, I feel she isn't Steampunk enough? But I think the elements you're thinking of adding will help with that.
Maybe I'm just too into leather and buckles :P.
I did struggle with that some. At first I was going to go goggles, cogs and leather... but after going over the design with a fashion design friend, I changed my mind. Instead of using the typical steampunk stuff, I decided instead to make it so that she could conceivably appear in a steampunk world and not feel anachronistic, while picking each item of clothing to reveal more about her character and personality and not because it's typical of a certain style.
I don't know how successful it really is then in terms of steampunk, but the main goal is to make a well-executed piece of work for my art portfolio, and whether it fits with the original theme is relatively unimportant then. :) I'm open to suggestions though!
Then the bow could belch steam and smoke too.
@hanli: Thanks! I was originally not going to go with the open skirt, and my original design was more conventional, like this:
After showing that to my ex-fashion design friend (Gareth Pon), he suggested the skirt in the top left image as something that allows the legs to move freely, while also having nice flowing cloth for the cloth simulator* to play with. Maybe if I remove the frills at the bottom of the pants they'll look more like the hot-pants they were supposed to be, and less like knickers?
(* I need to run a cloth simulator to be eligible for the Mixamo-Houdini competition in which I'm competing.)
How do you start your sculpts. Do you have a plugin which creates basic nudes from settings or are you actively sculping the entire body from scratch?
A year or two ago I did a course with Sze Jones (who worked at Blur Studio for about a decade, before heading off to Naughty Dog; she's done the cinematic characters for stuff like SWTOR, Tomb Raider, Jack from ME2, etc.), where I learnt a crapload about redirecting topology, and the thought-process one goes through when solving topological puzzles. I ended up with a very decent base mesh from that course. So I have humanoid base meshes for male and female figures, and sculpt the nude from that. For clothing, depending on how tight it is to the figure, I either extract and edit polygons from the nude base mesh and continue sculpting them, or create new geometry in a modelling app before sending them off to be sculpted too.
I think that maybe extending the pants down to the thigh rather than stopping at the groin/thigh join would also help - just an inch or two. Similarly with the dress front.
I think if the boots went above the knees it'd make the mystique of the section better, I feel like large chunks of skin to be anti-courtesanish, but that's a minor nitpick :)
@Tuism: I don't think it's historically correct AT ALL. :P Definitely style over substance/function. But yeah, I don't really care as long as it's somewhat believable. And yeah, I was using some barmaid-courtesan reference as well. The idea is that she's flirty, hedonistic, and a bit of a violent psychotic. :P Kind of like Miss Fortune in League of Legends.
Over the weekend, I made the pants and skirt a little longer and played with the colours to see if it looked interesting, or whether it felt bare. Then I got depressed over it looking bare and took a break.
I took some time out to copy some photos instead (i.e. photo open in Google Image Search on the second monitor, and paint from that). Just wanted to get a likeness, and to pick colours that didn't suck. I like how it turned out.
That painting looks awesome, is it the Mother of Dragons from Game of Thrones? Looks like her :)