[20.12.2020]
Today I finished my second project: A realistic viking, rendered with vray in Maya. It's the first time I made something realistic and of course I had some trouble with it.... like it is with all new things.
Scroll down to see some work in progress informations.
But first... here you can see the final results:
Progress:
[17.11.2020]
This is a WIP after 3 or 4 weeks.. and of course she will get some hair, looks a bit weird without :D
[18.11.2020]
Still there's so much to do. I'm not quite happy with the texturing yet, it's too even. So I'll come back to it when I've finished the hair. Which turned out to be a real pain in the a**... xgen really drives me crazy.
Since 2 weeks I get one problem after another.... as soon as I fix one I have the next.
First issue was how to assign xgen to a referenced object: not really possible, you have to assign it on the source file. So I did that. Next problem was that maya crashes instant when I tried to change a frame, turned out that I had "update preview automatically" on the fur turned on, so maya ran out of memory...
After that maya messed up my fur when I saved the scene in another frame than the original pose. Took me another day to find out... I think the issue here is that I hadn't cashed out my animation from A-pose to posed before I assigned the xgen.
Then I needed to assign my xgen density maps to a new UV-set without UDIMs. After one week I found out that it won't work with UV linking and xgen always uses the first UV set. So I made it vice versa and assigned instead of the density maps my actual skin textures to another UDIM Uv-set and changed my original set to one patch Uvs instead.
[26.11.2020]
Now... finally... everything works and I can start with her hair.
First I wasn't sure wether I should use xgen interactive groom splines or the 'normal' xgen. In the end I used the groom splines for the braids and xgen for the actual hair.
[04.12.2020]
I spent the last days to work on the texturing of the fur and hair again... and I think it was worth the time. I added a lot more color variations to make it more interesting and realistic. I added some more dirt and blood on her clothes and skin too. Especially her hands were too clean. I also made her hair overall longer and less symmetrical.
Still I think her clothes are to clean... I'll continue work on them. Also the lighting still looks terrible since I didn't spent time on it.
[11.12.2020]
The last few days I worked on some more details in the textures, the lighting and I added a bit of fluff on the fabric and some fine hairs on her skin. You can't see a huge difference between now and my last entry but still it looks a bit better now.
[18.12.2020]
Today I had planned to start rendering... unfortuantely I had to cancel it after some hours because the render time was waay too long and it would have take me an eternity to render all of the 1300 frames. I experimented a bit with some different quality settings and the samples of the lightsources and could reduce the render time per frame by 30mins. I also used this time as an opportunity to change some small things in her hair that still disturbed me...