Friday, October 16, 2009

Making Faces

Making faces. Literally. I think ... for the first time ever ... I just ran out of memory while rendering a piece of artwork. And that's no mean trick when you have 6G of Ram. So I'm pouting a little bit because I couldn't have the absolute top-of-the-line software rendering for the above piece, which is an early poster/promo design. Do I need more RAM?! Good heavens.

Also ... making faces meaning, making NEW faces. I just designed the platinum blond in the above poster. Ooooooh...! See more:

(You can click on these thumbnails and get larger renditions)

Here is the face in repose; no expression yet. You can fiddle to your heart's content at this stage, and basically make any face you can imagine. I should think (and here's a project!) you could sit down and model Brad Pitt. It would be interesting to take a crack at that! I might just have a go at that, if I can only find the time.

Anyway, this is the phase before the model "comes to life" with expression, humor, the sparkle in the eye, and what not...


And here he is starting to come alive. A good thing to do in this phase is to swing the 3D model around and take a look at him from all angles, make sure he looks good from all sides -- also, that expressions look the way they're supposed to.







And now you can start to get adventurous. This was the point where I put a second figure in the background -- the redhead from "Urban Hero" but without the sunnies. (You don't actually take the sunnies out of the shot; you click an icon and they disappear ... they're actually still there.)

And this was also the point where I began to pout myself, because it rendered ... weirdly.

The second character "rendered" as dead-black areas rather than a proper treatment. To did get it to render by lowering the quality settings, but I was somewhat astonished to run out of RAM with 6G tucked into the chassis and added on as "ram boost" or whatever the call it. Hmm. Makes note to self: find out how much RAM chips cost these days.

Jade, 17 October