“The secrets of Swimsuit babe ” by CGriders
1 Introduction
Making an attractive woman is always a goal for most CG enthusiasts. It’s also true to me. After a few years’ learning, I think it’s time to make one myself. Apart from attractiveness, I also want it to be a full body character, have long hairs, long legs, healthy skin tone, wearing high-heel shoes, and I want to avoid nudity as well. The costume of the character would need to show most of the body. The types to choose are lingerie and swimsuit. I decided for the latter after I came across some Jantzen’s swimsuits in a magazine. The one I adopted is its 2007 design and it can be found in its website http://www.jantzen.com .
The character would be fictitious. I didn’t want it to resemble anyone. Because I wanted to make a perfect looking body and did not want to be hindered by anyone who is not necessarily perfect. In that case, I could also be relieved from spending too much time to pursue likeness indefinitely. Moreover, the character would be a westerner and have blond hair. There was no sketch of pose or facial appearance as this was just a personal project. There was no need to get approval.
The softwares I used were Maya 7 for modeling and rendering, ZBrush and Photoshop for texturing, and Shake for compositing. See the list in section 6.1. The project is documented in three chapters: Modeling, Hair and Rendering. Hair requires special treatment as its modeling and rendering are very different from the rest of the scene.
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2 Modeling
2.1 Objective
To make an attractive woman, the facial features as well as the body must be well proportioned. There’re rules for well-proportioned face and body. They can be found in most drawing books. Refer to those listed in section 6.2.
2.2 Approach
Here I’m going to do usual polygon modeling. There’ll be no subdivision modeling as mental ray can’t render subdivision surface. I won’t try ZSphere modeling in ZBrush which I don’t think would work for me.
There are basically two different approaches for polygon modeling: box modeling and patch modeling. The former starts from a cube or sphere which is then “sculpted”. You’ll rough out the overall shape and then increase density gradually until you’ve reached the final shape. The latter starts from a small polygon patch which may be converted from a NURBS patch or may just be a square or cube, which is a rough shape of a local feature like lips or eyepit. You’ll then extrude edges or faces repetitively until you’ve modeled the whole shape. My approach is a hybrid one: I use different techniques for different features in the face and body.
My goal is to create a model having a good topology up to the level which is good enough to make it look attractive. In other words, details like wrinkles under armpits and those on top of knuckles and knees are not necessary to appear in the model. They’ll be delayed until after I’ve finished rigging and rendering. They’ll probably be realized by applying displacement map to the model in later stage. But render time will be compromised for sure.
Moreover, I’ll not eagerly pursue all-quad model and edge loops because I don’t see why they’re necessary. But a neat topology is composed mostly of quadrangles so I’ll try to make the model nearly all-quad as much as I can for this technical reason. Later when I need to import the model into ZBrush, I’ll simply smooth it once and it’ll be all-quad.
Although edge loops are not necessary, edge flow is important to make a model look natural. The reason is obvious because a natural looking model can deceive your eyes such that you can almost see the underlying muscle and bone structure formed by the edges.
Finally I’m not going to paint texture like painting game characters. I’m trying to produce natural looking flesh out from modeling (with proper shader tuning of course) so that I don’t need to do painting to emphasize structure. You can see how much I have achieved it by looking at the final image. The result looks more natural than those which rely heavily on painting.
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