DT - Female Andriod: Alexia
 

Mirek03 got me thinking about subd modeling in Maya again.

I had worked on this model some time ago but never finsihed it. I was new to Maya and subd tools in Maya kinda suck. I dusted off the cd's last night, ordered out for pizza and went on an orgy of modeling!

Here are some renders of the bits I completed. I will start on the head soon.

back
 

back...

3/4 shots
 

3/4 shots

3/4 back...
 

3/4 back...whoops...

3/4 back...
 

3/4 back...

Looks pretty good, but whatÕs that thing on her back on the 3/4 back shot? :confused:

The spot on the back was a mentalray glitch.

I really like it, keep it up! :)

assembled and adjusted body parts
 

I assembled and scaled the body parts. I adjusted the following:

- thinned and lengthened upper arm
- thinned upper thigh
- thinned abdommen in xz
- scaled hips xyz

Overall the proportions seem correct to me now. Please let me know if anything jumps out at you.

3/4 front...

side ...

3/4 back

back...

Alexia: Model B
 

I was not pleased with the hipjoint. A simple nurbs cyclinder seemed to simple and would present problems for rigging, so I improved the design to a ball joint while maintaining the inorganic feel.

It also looks more femanin the the bulky tube stuffed in a hole.

What do you think?

UPDATE: 5/1/07

HAHA I just noticed her feet are reversed in this shot....

isolated shots of hip joint

wow I wouldn't have thought a little ball joint instead of a bulky shaft would make that much of a difference. it's lookin good, keep up the good work!

Body pretty much completed...
 

With the redesign of the hip joints I am calling the body modeling portion of this project completed.

I'll be moving on to the head soon....



UPDATE:

Feet on correct side now (lol)

I refined the torso a bit. I am calling thhis version model B2. It has my redesigned hip joints and standard size chest.

I call this B2 because in my original version I enhanced the chest.

I'll post that version as well. Not sure which I like the best.

back w and w/o procedural textures

I call this verion Breastzilla
 

The first version of the torso I did I enhanced the chest a bit. Since I refined the entire torso I kept both versions.

Here is model B1: large chested Alexia...

and the back ...

I am a bit delayed on the head. I decdied I am going to use a different face model then the one in the video. I need to grab a couple pictures of her to model from.

Cheers!
Rick M.

Newbie question ;)
 

Hey
really nice pice of work !!
i started that tutorial a while ago as well.
like u, i tried to make my own version of a male android.. i somehow messed some parts up and now its hard for me to start all over.. i hope its okay that i add one of my renderings maby u could help me fixing that guy :D wid some ideas..

I have put the head modeling on hold. I want to use a different head model and need to grab some reference photos.

In the mean time I started putting her skeleton together. It's a pretty straight forward affair. Just rigid bind to most of the joints. I could have gone the parenting route but I prefer to keep the geometry and the rigging seperate.

The only section I am not sure how to do is the abdominal region. The sections betwewen the torso and the pelvis should be able to twist and bend, but I am not sure how to put the joints in this section (one at the top of the pelvis and one at the base of the torso?).

I am not sure how to bind this region (smooth bind or put a lattice on it and bind the lattice)?

I scribbled some notes on my thoughts....

really sweet work, am new to maya, posted my first work the other day i was just wondering, how would you do a shiney, scratched rusty metal look, for say doing an old andriod?

love the work though, sweet!!!

err?? wow.., :) you have nearly gone the Manga classic design route but lost it a bit around the pelvis and hip. the arms (your version) are PERFECT, really .., wow!? but the hips and pelvis look out of proportion to the shoulder/arms. Too big and pelvis too small. Looks better from the back (maybe a clue there??) but I can still see it looks out of proportion. I think you stopped redesign when you should have kept going, if you can get a balance (dont ask me how) between the top part of the torso to the lower part, she'll be a knock out my friend. already is but yu know what I mean.

Thats some fast work there, must have been some pizza, .., spicy?? :)

great stuff, this model begs to put one's own touch to it.., I keep thinking of what I think Kurt was trying to achieve with his free form free franky tut.., to sort of show beginners like me that one can play around a bit wwhen modeling, use it like clay and create something that truly belongs to one's self.

:eek: :beer:

glad I got you thinking, we are ALL better off for this model you are making.

if you are having trouble with animating the legs, have you thought of non-linear animation via Tracks editor, or is that what you mean you could have gone the way of parenting??

you dont need a skeleton with non linear animation, but I have a strong feeling you already know this :)

Thanks for the feedback. I am sure I will continue to tinker with the body (as usual I got fixated on the breasts). I have half a dozen variations on the upper body and have modified the upper leg a bit.

The pelvis and hips do have me scratching my head a bit. If you look at the final model in the tutorial you will see that the abdomen and pelvis are much smaller then my design. In fact the pelvis is practically nothing more then a torus flipped on its side. The Hips are as large or larger then mine and thicker and more rounded at the tops. The affect is very nice though. Overall the version in the tutorial looks more petite. I was kinda going for a more full bodied look. But I am sure I will continue to fiddle with the proportions.

I had to drive a stake in the ground at some point and wanted to get a skeleton in place. I'll probably have the photos I need to work on finishing the head geometry off this weekend.

As for animating the legs. With the ball and socket design they are easy to animate and will be able to be posed quite naturally. This design is a big improvement over the simple nurbs cylinder in the tutorial (IMO).

The only bit I am struggling with is how to design the skeleton and bind around the abdominal region. I want to be able to twist her but the upper torso and pelvis are fixed so the bands in the abdominal region will have to deform while the torso and pelvis they attach to cannot. I am not sure how to resolve this as I am quite inexperienced at rigging. Somehow I am thinking a lattice around that region would somehow work.

yes, its all opinion. interesting you have actually increased the pelvis area ( i was meaning pelvis to crutch IMO). BUT the tut has a more petite look? ??? well I cant wait to see what you mean. your's IS shapely and this morning it doesnt look so[pronounced?? Still, there is a balance of design to consider. IMO.

as for binding and joints, that's over my head at this stage, I dont know the difference between soft or rigid binding??? And going by the joint designs you have created..?? well it would seem knowledge must be relative because you seem to have a very good knowledge in this area and so also have a good knowledge of binding and so also must be modest.., a trait I've seen here at SM a few times before :)

fixated on breasts?? yes, same happened to me, ,,. 'just a little bit here and a little bit there, and hang to one side just a fraction without losing shape'.., must be the child inside :)


the week end?? look forward to it, this is one of the most interesting models I have seen for a while and also original, which is strange as it came off a tut originally??


ps, speaking of pelvises, fabster has an interesting one going with his /male (???)' android, very male, looks like a pleasure model?? :) I wonder whose face he used for the face plate?? first post too?
:beer:

Update: completed head and neck
 

I am still waiting to get some photos for the head model I want to use but in the mean time I got bored and knocked out a version with the head model supplied with the tutorial.

think it is a closer match to the photograph then the version modeled in the tutorial.

Full body w/head front...
 

Full body w/head front...

Some shots of the full body with the head. I am still grappling with scale on a number of parts.

- lengthened the arms
- scales the torso and abdomen in z-axis
- narrowed then rescaled the legs. (if I narrow the hips the proportions just don't look right to me).

back...

hey, that looks really good!
Do you mind sharing how you lit your scene and what shaders you used?

cheers;)

interesting that they dont look right because they look perfect to me. stunning actually, just goes to show, different tokes for different folks, man what you can do when you're bored?? I like to see you in working when you are enthusiastic, why do you say that, 'i got bored and did this', 'nothing to do so grabbed pizza and knocked out this'.., this is stunning stuff to most of the wannabse here like me, you should not be so modest (though sure, its a nice trait.) you should deliver this to us on a silver plate of pride :)

stunning stuff, I haven't had a moment to do more on mine, essays, web pages, the list is never ending and the pressure never stops.

incredible :)

NOTE: I am using Maya 8.5 so the exact position of these mental ray options may be different but I believe they are all there just in slightly different places.

For shaders I used simple blinns at around 50% diffuse color - blue for the body parts and grey for the aluminum. For the face I used 50% grey lambert. The dark metal parts are 30% diffuse grey blinn. For the rubber around the abdomin I used a 30% grey blinn with the reflectivity reduce to .2.

For lighting the scene I use no lights just the default lights.

I set the camera environment to light pale blue almost white.

The ground is just a nurbs plane with default lambert shader.

Then in the mental ray settings tab I chose the preset raytrace fine trace setting and then check the final gather preset box.

With default lighting enabled final gather will tend to over blow everthing so to compensate all my colors are farely dark 50% or less diffuse.

Notice how dark the body color is in the material ball compared to the final render color. Everything will be much lighter in the render due to the default lights in the scene and final gather. So all your colors will have to be much darker then they appear in hypershade. What I usually do is pick an area of bright highlight and then adjust the color in that area while doing spot renders until the highlights are not over blown. You sometimes have to make a compremise so that the shadowed areas do not get to dark.

That's it.

I tried building fancy shader networks and using hdri domes but find it takes 40 minutes to do a single render which usually looks like crap. The time it takes to do a single render is so long that trying to tweek the settings to get a good render just takes to much time and inevitably my system crashes with a "low memory warning message". So I have taken to just sticking with simple procedurals and presets.

wow, thanks a lot for these detailed insights. I never knew you could get lovely results like that with fairly simple settings.
-Great work :beer:

thanks for that detail,, must have taken some time to work them out, its very generous

yes there are few in the world lucky enough to have the time tweaking 40 min renders.., simplicity, if thats what one would call it, wins this round.

;)

I fiddled with some HDRI renders based on the tutorial instructions although they looked like total crap until I adjusted the mental ray final gather options enabling min / max rays value based on the scene size.

I used the measure distance tool and measured the width of the widest part of the scene (hand to hand) as 12.7 and then enabled min/max and used .12 and 1.2 based on this measurement.

I also increased the number of gather rays from 100 to 1000 although I have no basis for this number. This is the reason mental ray makes me insane! No where can I find instructions on how to properly come up with these values and the user guide reads like a poorly translated japanese to english stereo manual! So I just pulled the number 1000 from my ass. If 1000 is good why not 100000 or 10000000000000, other then the fact the render time went from 10 minutes to over 25 minutes. Once again it was a lot of freaking work to get a render not really a whole lot better then the basic ones I have made. There are still splotches and short of picking ridiculously large values for gather rays and randomly jiggling any of the other 50 properties in the hopes of improving the render I really have no clue what else to try.

You know what would rock, is a tutorial that explains shaders and all the values and what they really do:

color, ambient color, diffuse, reflectivity, eccentricity, ... etc.

Even better would be a simple table with a column that reads like shiny metal, shiny plastic, brushed metal, dull plastic, clear shiny glass, frosted glass, tin, steel, aluminun, brass, gold, chrome, porcelin, chalk, coal .... etc.

and then a row of values for color, ambient color, diffuse, reflectivity, eccentricity, ....etc.

Then you could use the table to get a base material type and with a intelligible description of what the shader properties like diffuse really do you can make adjustments. But then again I have nothing better to do then randomly push 50 different property sliders around in the hopes of randomly getting a matterial that looks like something I want. lol

that would make a lot of sense, i've looked for such a list in vain for years.., thinking about and uncharacteristically defending the powers that be.., maybe every video card is different making standardization difficult.

i have still had completely no time to do anything else except uni.., have to do it for an assignment i want to use it in..

she look great.

Added Decal to the Shoulder...
 

Comming down to the final details on this model. Here I have added the Decal to the shoulder pad.

Oddly enough I has some problems with this section. At some point I must of upped the subd resolution and then somehow baked it into the Base 0 resolution. So instead of 2x2 faces to apply the decal too, I had 4x4 faces.

This seemed to me to be trivial until I tried to apply the shader with the decal image to the 4x4 subd faces and found that instead of one copy I got 4! I thought oh no problem I'll just do something with the 2D placement node to stretch a single copy onto the 16 faces. Half a day later and nearly bald and mute from pulling my hair out and cussing at the top of my lungs I could not fix it!

I finally figured it out though. I converted the subd to polygon mode and then applied the shader and then used create uv and planer projection to stretch a single copy of the decal on the shoulder pad.

All I have left now is to add some minor details to the heat sinks on the back of her head and also add a small detail to the center of the ceased area in the chest plate (a circular badge detail with a light in it) and the modeling and texturing will be done.

Than I want to rigg and bind it.

the image...
 

Shoulder decal...