wippy hair

A photo posted by Marcus Ng (@markyngyc) on Sep 10, 2016 at 9:07pm PDT

Been working on some wippy hair in Xgen.

JD Pirate Headsup

One of the main considerations for this little project was to try and do stylized hair. Though it's not a big portion of the final render, it was one of the main decisions to finish it. Since I had the experience with styling hair in Blender, I considered blender for rendering --it was so, so intuitive to groom it in blender, I fell in love with it. At the same time, I wanted to try out Zbrush's fibermesh. Also considered Renderman as my choice of renderer. In the end it was a mix of zbrush's fibremesh and good old hand drawn curves. In the end, did a bit of texture adjustments,moved some parts around and tons of shader tweaks.

Comparing the older one and this one, forgive my shamelessness for posting that. I was a Vray noob then. I'm not surprised if I will hate this version one day but yeh moving on.

Big thanks to Dan, Dongjin and Brendan for your fresh eyes. Appreciate it much.

"Terror that flaps in the night."

Dark Wing Duck was done for a Blender competition on facebook organised by Joe Lee Manns. Took my stab at it since Dark Wing Duck was a childhood character I grew up with and also I've been wondering much about Blender. Modeling with the modifiers reminded me of 3DSMax which I do wish that Maya can have one day.

Since it was my first attempt at using Blender. I was googling everything. EVERYTHING. period. From navigation in the scene to rendering SSS and fur. I was a baby, not knowing anything. I wasn't able to do anything without googling for help and thanks to Blender's great online community and tutorials I was able pick it up really fast. The ones I used mainly were Blenderguru, Cgcookie and Youtube. Thoroughly impressed by Blender's rendering speed as well, it took seconds when occlusion was included.

Model sheet supplied.

Modeled, rigged, pose test and simply lit with Blender.

 For the contest, I was still trying to render hair and making it look good till the very last minute. YES, I am amazed by Blender's hair system also it is actually a particle system. and YES, it allows the hair strands to be very easily manipulated. However, I wasn't able to render the fur to look good. for some reason, it was getting blown out in some spots. Furthermore, rendering on an archaic system that runs on XP 32 bit was suicidal. I had to break the model and rendered them part by part and at times Blender just crashed after it finished rendering. F*** me. It was a thorough nightmare.

above is model before hair was added and bottom is with hair added.

Time was running out and I had to just hand in a " decent" render. Deep inside I was devastated, I wasn't able to add fur, and even do proper textures for it. I had a vision for it which didn't pull through. Sigh.

Final submitted image for contest.

After the deadline, I went back and started troubleshooting the file, going to older files for some materials setups, started reading more forums and tutorials. I did learn much in this process but honestly hope to still better it in the future. "The best is yet to be".

Final Rendered Image... for now.