One of the nice things about my custom rendering distribution system is that it saves all of the images that have been rendered. This allows me to easily go back through time and collect all of the renderings of a character during the various stages of development. I thought it might be interesting to post one such series for people who aren't familiar with the kind of process I use for getting the "look" of the characters in Sushi Bar Samurai.
I've posted them in chronological order, which may seem counter-intuitive because you will have to go back to earlier items to "start at the beginning"... but, I thought it would be best to do it this way so that the actual timestamps on the images go in the order in which they were actually rendered. Plus, it gives me some incentive to add a button in Nebula for switching the sort order :)
It's just not that hard.
I was finishing Sushina's chef's coat yesterday, and so I mildly sculpted a high-res version of the coat in Mudbox because I find that some subtle detail helps to make it feel more like cloth (I tend not to do too much high-res sculpting for the characters in this game, because they are supposed to have more of a clean surreal look, and I have found that putting too much detail into the faces and such breaks that look). But of course I can't just use the high-res mesh, because 3DS MAX will roll over and die in multiple ways (way too slow, and way too impractical to assign the skin weights, completely ridiculous animation update times, etc.) So what I prefer to do is bake a displacement map from the high-res sculpt, and then use that.
But here's the thing: baking never seems to work. I'm constantly having problems with it. God for bid you have even a slight problem with your UVs - Mudbox et al will just lose their shit immediately if that happens. But assuming you do have good UVs, and everything's fine, still Mudbox seems to just have magical problems sometimes and you can't get a bake out of it (I've attached the image you get out of Mudbox if you try to bake the coat as a displacement map).
OK, no big deal, Mudbox didn't work. I'll just export the high-res map to MAX, and let that bake it with Render to Texture, right? Wrong. Even worse result there.
But then I thought, hey wait... I've written this code before! It's in Granny. So I dropped the old Granny plug-in into MAX, and used that to cast. What a surprise! Perfect map (attached).
What is the big deal here? I really don't understand. I mean, I feel like I did a good job on the texture baking tools in Granny, and I definitely think they're better than anything else I've seen. But I was thinking that was true about the quality of the maps produced, and the flexibility. Not about the fact that it works at all. I just don't know how you produce a tool like this that just plain doesn't work. It's not that hard of a problem. Getting the quality good is tricky, getting the speed up is an interesting problem, making it really flexible maybe... but just making it output a map that could vaguely be considered correct? How hard is that??
Well, I feel like I'm back in the swing of things now. This was a really tough angle on a reclining pose, and actually, I feel like it went really well. I'm not terribly happy with the drawing, but really, it kind of looks like what it looked like - I mean, it just wasn't really a very interesting pose to draw. But it came out OK, and I felt like I was in control of the drawing the entire time (which is unusual for me).
The hardest part of the drawing, as with most faces, was the lips, primarily because they really are more of a tonal variation than a shading variation (which is obviously not directly representable when you are only dealing with a shading medium, ie. single color charcoal). It was aggravated by the fact that at such a weird angle, and with gravity pulling everything in a different direction than normal, the shape of the mouth was really pretty weird. I didn't draw it quite right still, but I think I need to gain another 1500 experience points before I can really do a good mouth in charcoal with a situation like that. Or, maybe I'll just cheat and put on some +5 gloves of dexterity :) OK, enough RPGness for now.)
Well, today was the first day back at studio since the summer semester at SAFA ended (why they break studio in sync with the semesters I have no idea, since as far as I can tell, none of the people who go to the weekend/night studios take classes there...) Anyhow, things went superbly. I could feel that I was pretty rusty, so I did three warm-up quickies first before diving into a full drawing, and at first I thought the full drawing was going to come out crappy, but I dug in and refused to let it go, and it ended up coming out quite nice.
The model was really cool looking - she was vaguely asian with really neat stern features and a crew-cut like hairdo. Because I spent so much time warming up, I only had about an hour and a half for the drawing, so I only got to finish the face and hair. The ear and the neck I threw on at the last minute (as with the drapery), and so unfortunately, they suck. I really wish I had another hour, or even half hour, because I think this drawing would've been my very best one ever if I'd had the time. As it is, it's still one of the better ones, for sure.
The other hillarious thing about today's studio is that the crappy drawing instructor who tought the class that I dropped out of was there practicing as well. So, of course, I wanted to know if she actually drew well. Man, the answer to that question is a resounding "no". She can't draw her way out of paper bag man! There's a fundamental line you have to cross, after being a beginner, that gets you into "intermediate" or whatever you want to call what I am now - and that line is that your drawing starts looking like _the_ person, and not _a_ person. She's still in the _a_ person category, because from the drawing she did, you'd swear she was looking at a different model :) Anyway, more proof that if you're going to bother taking a drawing class, you really need to do your research first and find a teacher who draws really well.
So, today reminds me of something I've been meaning to talk about for a while, which is that I don't buy the whole "drawing on the right side of the brain thing", or whatever the hell it is that they say about disconnecting the semantic understanding while you draw. I don't find that to be the case at all. For me, the more I semantically understand what I'm seeing, the better i can draw it.
Today's case in point: models lying down. I've only done this two or three times. This time I didn't do so well, and it was largely because I tried drawing mostly straight-on (ie., without turning my head 90 degrees so I could see the face rightside-up from my perspective). The previous time, I drew mostly that way (with my head tilted), and it came out much better (see Drawing Jam 12-07-2002).
So this leads me to believe that, at least for me, I need to understand what I'm seeing, not just pretend it's an arbitrary collection of lines and blobs and stuff. I just don't buy that. Because when I'm look at the model and I'm like, yeah, OK, the backlight is hitting the rim of her nose and I'm getting an oily reflection off that part that connects the nose to the cheek, and the eyes are reflecting the window, etc., etc., that's when I really do good drawings, because I get what's going on. When I just try to disconnect and draw abstractly, that's when things come out looking like shit.
Today was short poses, and at this point I'm really just not interested in short poses, because I'm still on a faces kick and you can't do faces in twenty minutes... at least not at the level of detail that I usually do.
The model was pretty darn ugly today, so, well, it's not just me drawing weird. I mean, part of it is that, because I only had such a short time to draw it, but the other part of it is that even a long pose portrait of an ugly person looks ugly. Some people are interesting-ugly, and others are just ugly, and in this case it was the latter.
Today was bizarre. First of all, there was some kind of substitute monitor for the studio, and she was like, totally confused. I had to show her how to use the book sign-in and stuff, and then she spent like six years futzing with the lighting and everyone was complaining about everything. It sucked.
BUT, the model had a really bizarre face and I was almost at right angles with her view direction, so I had a great time drawing. I did one drawing for the entire time, and I'm really pleased with the way it came out. It's very accurate.
Oh yeah - and that thing in her nose? I think it's a stud or something. I honestly couldn't tell what it was even from as close as I was, so I just drew what it looked like as best I could. I think it must've been a very small highly reflective jewel mounted on a squarish stud... or something.
Once again, not a very interesting model. And not a very good drawing either. I seem to have the most trouble with drawing when I'm in the front of the ring, which is where I was today. The problem seems to be that because the right is kind of horseshoe-shaped, the ends of the ring are closer to the model then the top of the ring, and so when I'm at the top, I'm further away, and I can't see very well. So the drawings are kind of undetailed.
That said, it was a short-pose studio, so no drawing could take longer than 25 minutes. So some came out OK considering that restriction. The final drawing I just gave up on 'cause I was bored, and I just went home. I'd already drawn basically the same thing two drawings prior, and I just wasn't super-interested in doing it again.
Well, not a lot to say today. The model was not terribly interesting. The drawing came out looking pretty much like what the view from my easel was, but it just wasn't very interesting. I spent some time playing with smudging things around, and using my kneadable eraser to lighten things where necessary.
I like the way the shading came out today, because it was very solid, and it gives a good feel to the different parts of the face. It makes everything look like a physical thing, instead of a drawing, kind of - if you know what I mean. I'm not really making a lot of sense here but you get the idea.
Anyhow, next week I won't be able to go to open studio, because I'll be at home visiting my parents. And that is the last open studio session in this series - so hopefully the new series will start soon, since I'm just getting back into the swing of things here.
Today was somewhat disappointing, because I feel like I still need a few more studios to really get back into shape, but today's model was really beautiful. She's much better looking than I am good with Conte. I tried to do a decent job, but really, I know I need more sessions with Conte, and really I need to get a good Conte-compatible pencil, for this kind of thing.
That said, I still like the way the reclining post came out - this was a one hour pose, and I think I handled the tricky fleshtoning reasonably well given that I still don't totally have my head around the Conte behavior yet. What I've basically been doing is drawing with the Conte like I draw with the charcoal, and then I smudge it with my finger, and then I rub it around with a shamois. I can't do any fine detail this way - that's why everything always looks so blurry, compared to my charcoal pencil drawings, which look extremely sharp.
So really, what I'd like to do is find a nice pencil that works with the Conte (the charcoal pencil comes out obviously gray if you try to use it with the Conte, which is overpoweringly black). I really like the strength of the Conte and the BFK paper, but the sticks are just too blunt to do the detail work that I like to do.
