Character Updates

So my characters are pretty much done! Only things left to do are: n-cloth for the clothes, which will be done after rigging/posing; hair, which I am still figuring out how to do; some surface detail on the girl's sweater, which I may end up combining with the texturing process; and the little girl's shoes, which I'm having to re-do no thanks to some major wonky geometry/zbrush issues (which thankfully have been mostly resolved). At this point I'm thinking that fiber-mesh will be the best option for hair. I was examining Rockwell's illustrations, and while his characters tend to be slightly stylized or caricatured, the hair is fairly realistic. Sculpted hair would be much too stylized, and while there is the option of painting transparency maps on planes, it tends to lend itself to "neater" hairstyles, whereas my characters both have messier hair. An added benefit of using fiber-mesh is that since I will have to convert it to geometry in order to have it be compatible with all the render engines, it will allow me the opportunity to see how each one handles such high levels of geometry. While I am confident Arnold will have no issue with it, I am curious to see if Mental Ray can handle it without crashing.

Speaking of hair, obviously because she has none right now, the little girl does look a little odd. But in the few very rough tests I have done she looks much better with hair :-) The hardest part of sculpting these characters for me was trying to make sure their characteristics matched to either male or female. Even though boys and girls around this age do tend to have very similar features, they still needed to be distinguishable from each other. Their outfits are not taken directly from one Rockwell illustration, but rather pieced together from several, as I took some artistic license to envision what they would be wearing in my own interpretation of the "Tackled" piece I am using as my main inspiration.

As soon as I double check all my UVs for stretching, I get to pass these guys on to be rigged, and while that's happening I get to start texturing and shading. I'm hoping that part of the process will be much quicker, since I do feel I have a better idea in my mind of what the textures should look like (whereas with the modeling I wasn't initially sure what direction I was going with the characters' final look).