Rebel Hill

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So.. here he is... my long suffering, on the back burner lil friend... Jerico himself.

Although I had been less than perfectly happy with one or two of my Jerico series characters... the lil fella himself had always seemed pretty OK to me... but after retooling janet, adn seeing them both together, the existing mesh just looked... amateur (hardly surprising, it kinda was reli).

So that of course led me to having to create a new mesh for Jerico too, adn here's the result. As you can see, he's got better flow, is higher poly, but without being too nuts, so he's got good detail, adn his clothing, which previously was boned, has been remodelled ready for applying dynamics to. He's got a rounder head, a bigger head, bigger eyes, which are properly round, a smaller jaw, and far better hands and feet.

Overall, imo... he just looks cuter now, more... character-full... more like i originally imagined him (:

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First thing, of course, after ive finalised the mesh itself is to bang out the UVs, cos I intend to get busy with ZB and so on. Considering that way of working, I really do have to have the mesh and UVs completely locked down at this stage... theres no real chance to go back and bandsaw or glue thigns here n there later when u find out this or that doesnt deofrm quite as you'd like...

But... since this is a rebuild, of pretty much the same proportions... I was able to bolt this new mesh onto the old rigs and animation, and tweak it accordingly... so having done that, I felt safe enough to call it "done" and get onto the next stage.

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And finally we get him some Zbrushy goodness... Since he is pretty much a cartoon character still, Im not going overboard with him... and since he is for animation, I want most of the shaping, musclulature, etc, to be done in mesh, rather than via displacements... so really ZB here is jsut a way for me to start adding in some small surface details... lump a few bits up here n there, but without really reshaping him at all... That and its a lot easier than painting bump maps in tattyshop... though that said... this wont be all of his surface detail, I will still paint a few additional details into a separate bump, and get busy with some precedurals... just like my other characters, a good mix.

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And so being done in ZB, its time to start testing things out back in LW. I export a number of maps from ZB, normal, displacement, cavity... and i also do them at different lods to let me attenuate the fine details later in LW, it also lets me separate finer or larger details for driving different elements of the shaders.

Here, Im starting out with a fast skin shader... simple colour for the moment, just getting the basics of diffise colour, normal and dispace depths, and the basic mean setting for the sss shading.

Normally I use simple skin, and fast skin is avoided generally as its interpolated and therefore flickers during animation... However... I recently finished off a job where i used fast skin in animation, and found that, used in the right way (basically for mostly frontal scattering rather than shine through), its TOTALLY solid for animation, as well as looking great and rendering fast... so thats gonna be my start point for Jerico.

Since simple skin and fast skin share the same input variables, its also easy to jsut wire across and switch shaders out without needing to really do anything to your driving nodes, so I imagine that ill probs end up switching back and forth between the two shaders on something of a per shot basis.

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And heres a further bit of surfacing... Started painting in the first texture layer (the diffuse element atm), done some additional bump work, and added some maps to attenuate the sub surface effects.

For the "sausage meat" look to the skin, Ive used the crackle node in LW. Turning down the small scale to get a fatter, blobbier texture I find gives a great, organic, cellular look, and here its being used as a multiplier for the sub surface visibility input, to give that "under brightening" effect... which, imho, seems to work pretty well.

One of the next steps will be to selectively adjust both the scale of the procedural, and its density, which i plan to do with a weight map, as itll give me quicker, more interactive adjustments than an image map would, and I find its also easier to maintain specific values that way, so u can know just how much of a numerical value ur actually inputting.

Onwards!!!

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So just another couple of WIP images here... Hve painted in some extra bump details by hand, adjusted some of the procedural elements for scale and density, painted the epidermis map, and started to mix together the bump and normal components... Not a lot else to say at this point, but Im hoping to be finished with him by the end of the weekend.

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Heres some detail shots to show different bits... the teeth and tongue, which we dont see too much of, but its all in there and ready to go for when we need it. Also a couple shots in 20% grey just to show the bump and normal details at work.

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Heres the main maps used for the skin... running left to right, the main diffuse layer, the epidermis, the subdermis, the specualr scalar map, the glossiness, and the cavity map from ZB, which itself was used in photoshop and blended into the colours, but which is also used in shader as a modifier for the depth and visibility of the subsurface in all the cracks and lines.

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And heres the node setup for the shader... Looks complicated, but tis really not, just the image maps, a few procedurals using either alpha maps or weights to blend them together with the colour maps... a good few gradients, to allow me to adjust the effect of the weights without having to go back and forth to modeller or photoshop to make tweaks... and a whole bunch of painted, sculpted, and prcedural bump and normal details.

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And here's the final lil guy... and thats about all there is to say... Animation is next. Enjoy!