Mike: I agree about knees, in fact her legs seem a bit more spread than they should. If you look at the first images of her, you will see this comes from the beginnig of process of modeling. Particularly, I think she is charmous this way. But important to say here it's not a problem with rigging. About the hands, I think they are good this way. I'm a great manga/anime fan, and I'm habitued with some "distortions" japanese do to make their chars more expressive, like make bigger eyes and hands. My idea here wasn't to do a realist woman, but a stilized woman, with some manga anime characteristics. If you look at her with this in mind, she wouldn't seems too strange...
Thanks for your cheers!

THX1138: Many thanks man!!! I tried to reduce specular values to make her skin less waxy, but it still!!! I'll have to spend some time later thinking in how I can fix that. I'm using Ray traced shadows, D map looks very strange to me.
About her rigging, I post above some pictures and comments about this. I'm using IK handles for limbs and wings.

t1ck135: Shadows.. another problem with PFX. What I have to do here is make a fake shadow under the hair. When I tried that for the first time, I didn't get good results. But I think now I'm able to try again. Tweak, tweak, and always tweak. This is my rule!!!
Thanks for cheers. About the rig system, you can find the entire process on Steven Stahlberg's website https://www.androidblues.com/rigtut.html

Did you know that you can use negative lights?

What the hell is that for? when you have two lights striking on the same surface the effect is one light wich haves an intensity of the sum of both.

So if you got a negative light you will substract intensity to the light in that surface and that will create a shadow in the lighted surface.

Could you post the specular map for her. There could still be too much specular on the map thats catching so much light. It would be intresting to see the color map aswell.

Legolas_hv: Very interesting. But I didn't get your idea. Are you suggesting I use negative lights for what? To solve my specular problems, or to make shadows for strokes? Sorry for my ignorance... :p

THX1138: To be honest, until this morning, she didn't have a specular map :blush: . To be even more honest, until last night, I had no idea in how to make an specular map :blush: :blush: ! But thanks your request, I spent some time learning and doing one, and I took advantage this to correct her skin color, tweak a little more the color map, and work a bit on specularity. Now she has an epidermal skin map, to define better her skin color. And skin isn't looking plastic anymore. But now it seems dry a bit for me. What do you think?

Follow some images I made for my entry.

UV Layout. It was a great headache doing this. But it was worth, I finally understood the importance a good layout has (though I know my UVs aren't the most beatiful thing in the world).

https://www.amauriilustra.com.br/CGTalk/UV_Layout.jpg

Color map.

https://www.amauriilustra.com.br/CGTalk/Skin_Color.jpg

Epidermal colors.

https://www.amauriilustra.com.br/CGTalk/Skin_Color_2.jpg

Specular map.

https://www.amauriilustra.com.br/CGTa...n_Specular.jpg

Here's a render with a bit more of work on skin. Now is starting to look better.

https://www.amauriilustra.com.br/CGTalk/Pose3_1.jpg

For some reason my images aren't display now... So it's better to go back here later!

no,i mean for the shadows
negative lights make things that are lighted to be darker
in this fast example i made a cube on a plane, 1 directional light and two spot lights with negative values for the intensity
just try it and you will realise what i mean

Attached Thumbnails

What are your settings ( in your MR render globals ) for your min and max radius in your final gather tab, and also your final gather rays? Increasing those settings will give you a cleaner render.

Very cool color maps. I have never seen a epidermal map before. I have seen many subsurface maps, and diffuse maps, but not epidermal maps. The dryness look could be from the epidermal map, but I'm probably wrong on that. You mentioned using negative lights. I have never seen anyone use negative lighting on a human model before. Try lighting with normal values on her and see what she looks like.

Finially, if your willing, send me the model and let me do some test lighting on it. I can send you the results outside the board so that it does not interfere with the challenge. But this is entirely up to you.

My final gather settings was disabled, I even didn't know they existed. But now I will turn this section on and test the values to see what happens. Altough this, I think the render is clean, except by the skin. But by my fairly poor knowledge of SSS, I think this is related to my lighmap settings, that I forgot to update before do the render. It seems I have to adjust the values of File Size Width and Height, depending of my camera resolution.
What I'm calling Epidermal map, for the lack of a more apropriate term, is the one I'm using on the "Subdermal Scatter Color" channel. I believe it's not the responsible for the dryness. I guess I reduced specular values too much, and this is the problem. I'll do more tests with this today. About negatives lights, Legolas_hv are sugesting I make use of them. But I think I wouldn't, time for testing things is very little now. Maybe for the next challenge.
Thanks for your offer about doing light tests with my model. But this is the kind of thing you have to discover by yourself. Your help is being extremely useful, and by now is enough to me. Many thanks, man!

It seems I finish my work on gun. Now let's to do some corrections on Michelle's skin, scene lighting, and some others things.

Wire

https://www.amauriilustra.com.br/CGTalk/Shot_89.jpg

Render

https://www.amauriilustra.com.br/CGTalk/Gun.jpg

Your in for a surprise if you didn't know about the final gather settings. The lighting looks a whole lot different once you turn final gather on. If you don't know much about how to set final gather here are some helpful tips. Start your FG rays around 500 or lower. Your min sample level should be 10 percent of your max level ( 20/200 for example ). You get the idea. Now with final gather, your render times wil increase quite a bit depending on your image rezolution. My 825x 480 stuff takes like 15 mineuts to render. Trust me, MR renders can be alot cleaner than the Maya software renders.

Best of luck !

nice gun and I hope you get what you want with the skin, it sounds like a minefield!

good luck in the home run and congrats on getting her to this stage

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bFlocking - a tool for Maya 8.5+ to generate flocking and swarming behaviours
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As I said when you began this project, this is a kick ass concept. You have pulled it off beautifully! I can't wait to see the final render!

THX1138: I'm sorry old man, but I didn't use of Final gather. It was slow to render, and gave me strange results in lights. Since I'm a little tired after two months, I decided to continue things as I was already doing. Thanks anyway for the tips, they will be useful on my next project.

t1ck135: Many thanks for your kind words

Swankymonkey: Sorry for you too. My final render it's not surprising, it's the same I presented before, with some fixes. As I said above, my gas is over for this project, and I'm very satisfied with my results, besides things ran into unexpected ways.

Well buddies, what I have to say now is... Thank You! Thanks for all those people that during two months spent some time viewing my thread, and writing something to me. When I look back my first tryings, and compare them with the final images, I can see how you have helped me and how useful was this challenge to me. And this was in great part thanks to you. So, I'd like to thank Simply Maya, for the idea and the chance they gave for us, and I like to thank all buddies had helped me: Swankymonkey (that was a great font of inspiration), MayaFreak, Legolas_hv, Varley, Stormgetto, Mike, and all those whose name I don't remember now but has helped me. And special thanks for THX1138 and t1ck135, that were very critical and forced me to high up my level. Many thank buddies, and good luck for you all!