Breasts

[Tojiro]

Thread title caught your attention, didn't it? ^_^ Actually, I want to ask some completely serious questions about the modeling of mammaries, but forgive me if I can't resist a pun or two.

First of, my current progress:

http://www.tojiart.com/images/renders/wires.png

I'm relativly happy with how this is turning out thus far, but once I tried getting away from the andorginous (sp?) look, I've run into problems.

You see, in case you haven't noticed, females have breasts. (shock!) So in an attempt to make my model more femminine I've attempted to give her some, with mixed results.

http://www.tojiart.com/images/renders/breasts.png

Things are looking pretty good from the side, yes, but the frontal view is pretty ugly, and perspective views have mixed results. Now, I'd rather not obsess over her chest, but this just looks bad >_<

(I should note that I'm trying for a more natural look than your standard comic book "I'm going to have back issues in my 30's" look. Breasts are attractive. Ballons are not. Now, that said, let's move on!)

In any case, I would appreciate some tips as to what I could tweak to make her chest look less ugly. And while we're at it, I'm happy to take comments on the model in general! Always willing to improve! If you are going to comment on the model itself, however, please note a couple of things:

1) The bulbous head and elongated neck are intentional. Yes, they look funky at the moment, but it's all for a reason..

2) This charecter is going to be the template for several sprites in an isometric game I'm working on. Therefore, it will be viewed from an angle like this at all times:

http://www.tojiart.com/images/renders/iso_view_lg.png

Only in the game itself it will be about this big:

http://www.tojiart.com/images/renders/iso_view_sm.png

Therefore a lot of the little details aren't going to be very visible. (Yet, notice that even at this size the breasts suck!)

Thanks in advance for any "uplifting" advice! (Hey, I warned you!)

[Tojiro]

Ooookay... Well, despite lack of advice I've tweaked it around a little more and ended up liking the result. I think the problem I had earlier was that the breasts were too "narrow", and thus looked very fake. I've streached and squashed 'em a bit to look less perky and more natural. What do you think?

http://www.tojiart.com/images/renders/new_wire.png

Meshsmoothed version.
http://www.tojiart.com/images/renders/new_smooth.png

I'd still love any comments (ANY comments!) on the figure in general. In the meantime I'm off to texture, rig, and clothe!

[JHarford]

Lol , you did a better job now , altho they look like an overdeveloped 12 yr old.
Not talking from experience

[Tojiro]

Yay! I gots a reply!

You mean the figure as a whole looks 12? Probably because of the big head, which again was intentional.

I'm going for that SNES sprite look: big head, stubby body, etc etc... Check out the charecter art for Final Fantasy 6 and you'll see what I mean. Of course, I'm not going to quite that extreme, but it still gives you the basic idea.

The charecter itself was modeled using a sketch from Mac-Hall as a "loose" reference. Ref (http://machall.com/gallery/storage/gallery-4/20040504-448.jpg)

[Ceccotti]

Looks pretty good altho I think is uses to many polys for such a simple model.

[Tojiro]

That could be true if I was using it in a realtime game, but as it is I'm going to be using a pre-rendered, meshsmoothed version as a sprite (ala Diablo 2) so complexity really doesn't matter. I simply want it to be reasonably smooth so it will render nicely. Even so, it doesn't have enough polies for me to really consider this a "High Polygon" model, so it got stuck in the realtime forum.

[Tojiro]

I hate this part of the process. >_<

Very quick and VERY dirty uv unwrap.

http://www.tojiart.com/images/renders/uv_wrap.png

And the resulting maps

http://www.tojiart.com/images/renders/f_head_uv.png
http://www.tojiart.com/images/renders/f_body_uv.png

Yes, there's big ugly seams in the foot. Yes, I just didn't care about the hand. (how do you unwrap those anyways?) and finally, Yes, the top of the head is kinda warped UV-wise. I figure I'm gonna give her hair, so it won't show much anyways.

Any unwrapping tips (or model suggestions in general!) are appreciated!

[Ceccotti]

O ok I understand what your doing now then. You are capturing the animations in to sprites. I know what your doing but I dont understand how exactly to do that,

[Tojiro]

In this case I have simply set up an orthigonal camera that's tilted about 30 degrees and aimed at the figure. I'll render each frame of animation from that camera (each frame will be about 32x64 pixels) and splice together the results by hand. Time consuming, yes, but I can't think of a much more effecient way, and this is easier for me than drawing the sprites by hand.

On that note, if anyone knows of a way to script maya's rendering so that it will render each frame on the same sheet at regular intervals, could you point me to it?