"Kata" character updated -- NSFW, some nudity

[masque]

Working title of my flick in progress is Kata, and will feature basically just this character. Costume (such as it is) is the "Stage 2" look, will have a bit more coverage with another garment still in the works.

Lots of tweaks and finessing still to be done before final animation starts -- more elaborate skin texturing, revisiting the facial vert weighting, maybe find a better solution for the hair, a lot of little to-dos. Also the ears seem to need fixing, they don't seem right to a number of folk.

But she's mostly complete and ready to show off. Enjoy!

1) Character concept art painted over an earlier naked & hairless render:


2) "Working pose" 4-view


3) Beauty shots in contrapposto



4) Portrait closeups


Some ear closeups if anyone wants to do a markup or paintover:


Done in Blender 2.45 release.

All feedback welcome. Thanks!

[Fovos]

can i just say sexy?

[masque]

can i just say sexy?

Sure. Sexy's good.

Some revisions to the face (ears, cheekbones, chin and neck, mainly), full-body skin texturing (almost complete), new pose:



Kata will be among other things a martial arts flick, hence the stance at right.

[Essinym]

your model is going ok so far, but I'm noticing a couple bits of anatomy issues that can use some touch ups

1) For the ear, its proportions are looking a bit alien right now, mainly due to the small lope and the overly circular top. I've attached a revamped ear for you, basically tweaking its proportions and balncing out the top and bottom halves, also added a bit of a divot to take some of the perfection out of top ridge.

2) On the anatomy pic I've highlighted some target areas you may wanna give some lovin. I know this chick is skinny but both her rib cage and hipbones seem rather non existent. try adding a bit more attention into the bony landmarks, nothin too crazy, but just enough to give the viewer an idea.

3. She seems a bit knocked kneed, the area around the knee cap and back of the knee need some lovin. her legs overall seem noodlely and can use another pass, check out some gymnast or karate girl refs and look a bit at their definition.

4. the feet. look at the contrast you have between the bony hands and her non-descript feet. They seem chubby in comparison. Do another pass alround on them, focus a lot of attention on both the insertions of the toes to the foot and especially the heel (very bulby and no sign of an achilles tendon)

5. The hands. the thumb looks as if it was extruded directly out of the side of the and rather than out of a nuetral angle, that and the thinness of it makes it look disjointed. It looks as if it runs straight out of the forearm rather than being attached to the rest of the hand. There also seems to be a dip in the hand where the carpals meet the wrist (seems broken). The knuckles are also too straight in line with each other, the knuckes of a hand follow an arc. Notice how low your pinky is to your ring finger because of this arc, the girls does not follow this natural pattern.

6. Face (would like to see a wireframe topology render to help comment)

7. The abs, could be just the lighting but the seem tooooooo flat, round off a bit more if its not the light

hopefully this'll help a bit, look forward to seeing the end result

[masque]

Great crits, Essinym, thanks for taking the time. Some of the issues mentioned are a result of my need to compromise on mesh density (detail) and rigging/animation practicalities. My original model was much higher poly count and thus had greater anatomical detail, but proved much too troublesome to rig and weight properly. So I re-topologized and economized and thus lost some finer detail. Still naturalistic, but more an ideal than a "realistic" figure (not much fond of that word, realisitic, it's such a can of wormy expectations to open). And while I had originally planned a hi-rez sculpt for normal mapping much more detail to this model, I'm re-thinking that approach now, as I'm not sure the raytracer I'm using will handle TS normal maps. Also the normal mapping approach might look odd given the amount of flex the figure will be going through, and the normal map would be restricted to a single pose. So I'm thinking it better to go with a certain level of stylization & idealization.

Here's the wires from the first set of posts, a number of current revisions not shown in them (second post of rendered images):




btw, the bluish form bottom R is the collision proxy I use with the soft-body hair meshes, which are constructed to lend some interactive/reactive motion to the hair when the figure moves. Another level of compromise between "realism" and practicality.

[masque]

Subtle detailing in the musculature (bump-mapped, since the raytracer I'm using doesn't play well with tangent space normal mapping), some reshaping and realignment per crits from here & elsewhere:



23-frame 360deg turn @ 1fps (QT)

Will be starting blocking poses after I fix some odd glitches that have arisen in the scripted drivers I use for her rigging.

C&C always welcome.

[Essinym]

Hey Masque, thanks for the topology renders. I noticed on the render of your female that when she smiled her facial lines seemed a bit off, I've done a paintover on how the skin and muscle of the face flows. you should be able to just spin a couple of edges to fix this issue, it will keep the same vert order and numbering since you aren't really deleting any verts which should prevent you from doing any re-weighting, and should sell the facial animations a bit better

[masque]

Yep, Essinym, that's what I'm on right now, thanks for the heads up. I realized when trying out various expressions that I was not getting the best deformations around the mouth, so I'm reworking the topo & weighting to try and correct it as much as possible. Luckily I don't have any critical-fit texturing in the facial UVs, so I hopefully won't have too many headaches in that dep't when revising.

[masque]

I reworked the facial topo around the mouth & cheeks, ran off a few expressions as tests:



Please note that part of the skin texturing/costume has been left out so I could see the expressions better, so she looks a bit monochrome, lips too pale, etc., and I haven't finallized the bump map for the skin pores so it looks a little coarse in places. Right now, just focusing on the expressive range and the response of the rig and mesh weighting.

[masque]

Quite a while since an update, having in the meantime switched to the Blender Internal rendering (because new versions don't support the YafRay raytracer), revised the character look to suit, added a more naturalistic head of hair, designed a new costume, wrote & recorded some music for the short, and have started blocking poses and animation. Whew!

First, the new look, mainly in her face and hair, also the title design for the short animation in which she appears:



I used a render of the working pose to paint over the "Act 1" costume design:



Now that Blender can bake tangent space normal maps I did a hi-rez sculpt that provided better anatomical detailing than the hand-painted bump maps I had to use with the YafRay raytracer:



Modeling the Act 1 costume was pretty straightforward, but Blender's Cloth sim created enough complexities that I simplified it some for the animations. These poses are from the opening sequence:



The animations have revealed a number of places I had to tweak the deformations, but the trouble spots like the shoulders are working well now, not as accurate as a still image might require but quite good enough for the animated figure:



An early title design test with "attitude" :

[Bai Fan]

What the hell is going on with your edgeloops? In the back of the legs and ... well ... all over you have loops with edges missing and faces floating in other faces.

I think you are going to have some problems with deformations.

Also, what software? And I have to admit... nice butt.

[masque]

What the hell is going on with your edgeloops? In the back of the legs and ... well ... all over you have loops with edges missing and faces floating in other faces.

I think you are going to have some problems with deformations.

Also, what software? And I have to admit... nice butt.

Wow, for a minute I was a little conflounded, then I realized you were referring to the wire shots.

I'm using Blender, as mentioned in a number of posts, and in some view modes, not all the edges show -- I've tried repeatedly to find a fix for that, haven't yet. It sometimes makes Sculpt mode a little more difficult than it need be, but you get used to it. The only other option is to show the model in Edit mode, in which case all edges show, but there are other limitations that make it less than desirable. Anyway, the loops you noted (good eyes!) are complete and she deforms well. I've also revised the mesh somewhat since those initial wires were screen-capped.

[Robert.B]

Hey man great to see an update from you. This is an interesting project and I cant wait to see it finished. I just wanted to throw some crits and suggestions at you with a quick paint over to help illustrate my point if thats cool with you. I think over all she has some nice soft anatomy and it looks like you have addressed some of the constructive crits others have given you. So what stands out to me the most right now is her shading and color application which as of now are very flat. Her skin color right now is 1 toned with no flush or cavity colors and there is nothing breaking up the skin tone which would add speckle and texture to the color. The hair although softer then your previous geo and alpha version need its shading and diffuse adjusted. I would say that she needs custom diffuse through out her entire make up as of now including the eyes. I darkened the hair and gave it more saturation added soft freckles to the skin and gave her some flush tones and adjusted the diffuse/ brightness over all on her face. Like i said there is allot quality here thus far you just need to tweak it in the right places and keep some reference on hand.

[masque]

thanks for the C&C, Robert B., definitely on the mark to large degree, though I think your paintover takes things a bit too far, she looks a bit sickly to me, but I understand your point, and it's well-taken.

The diffuse coloration on her skin was basically designed for a different rendering engine (the YafRay raytracer) and I haven't really revised it since moving to the Blender internal renderer. That move engendered so many other changes in terms of basic RGB hues, reactions to lighting, trying to keeep the shadows from flattening out, yada, yada, yada, that I was pretty happy to get her looking as you see. Check some of the closeups of the earlier YafRay rednerings and you can seem more variegation -- I have to revise my diffuse maps to compensate for the different renderer, but haven't gotten round to it yet. But I do want to keep it very subtle, as I'm not really reaching for "photorealism" as much as naturalism, with some idealization of form and color in the mix.

The hair, ahh, the hair, what a trial that was! It's fairly new to Blender, a particle effect, and as such it does not have the same reaction to lighting as geometry -- basically, no normals, per se. I had to use a custom hair-only lighting rig just to get the minimum of modeling you see in these shots. Getting variation in the diffuse coloration is very difficult and not terribly controllable. Bottom line, I could fuss forever and not get it perfect, so to a large degree I'll settle for good enough, though before final rendering to frames I may revisit it and see if I can get some of what you comment on into the mix.

Thanks again for the comments, very helpful and appreciated!

[Slothman86]

awesome model! I love the facial expressions! Not alot of clothing...LOL

[masque]

awesome model! I love the facial expressions! Not alot of clothing...LOL

A guy with your sig remarks about an abundance of skin? HAH!

Actually the story I'll be telling in the animation is told in dance moves that have some callbacks to the martial arts, also referred to in the title. I'm a big fan of Bob Fosse and more recently Rob Marshall, so skimpy costuming is right on the money (one of my visual inspirations for Kata was "Cell-Block Tango" from Chicago). In light of the story (which will remain untold until the flick is done), the costuming is quite appropriate, not just egregiously titillating, but you'll have to take my word on that.

Thanks for the kind words!

[Bai Fan]

I also noticed that in the renders when you pose her you never animate the wrists or fingers. This makes her look really stiff. Make sure to do full body poses and don't ignore the hands.

[Estrella]

Just wanted to say I love the overall design. Skin texture is coming along nicely. Can't wait to see more.

[masque]

I also noticed that in the renders when you pose her you never animate the wrists or fingers. This makes her look really stiff. Make sure to do full body poses and don't ignore the hands.

Also check out the contrapposto poses in the first post of the thread. The stiffness of her hands on many of the other poses is because she's using the "blade hand" technique, or more accurately, imitating it as part of her dance routine. In the initial sequence, the poses are rather stiff and formal by intent. If you've ever seen a martial arts kata performed you'll maybe have a sense of what I mean.

The image above reveals a few adjustments I need to make in the knee and wrist joints. I had originally modeled and weight-painted the body mesh on the basis of not using the sculpt->normal map process, so when I decided to go that route, it meant revising the base mesh pretty substantially in terms of detail, and as a result some of the weight painting doesn't work as well as it originally did. These kinds of highly-flexed poses (actually a frame from the Act 1 animation, but I'm using it to test the act 2 costume under stage lights) are helping reveal these areas that need attention. In order to progress on all fronts, so to speak, I'm blocking animations and timing them to the music track and tweaking the model and texturing and lighting and etc., all at once --being a one-man production team has it drawbacks

@ Estrella -- Thank you! Progress seems very slow sometimes (it sort of boggles my brain to realize I've been at this project for well nigh onto a year now ) but I keep moving forward.

[Robert.B]

I hope that hair is gonna be dynamically weighted because there will be nothing more distracting then seeing her fly all over the place with a starch a frozen hair cap. Also I'm curious as to which sword style your referencing because both Chinese northern straight sword style as well southern broad sword make use of a relaxed wrist and tight grip. the only time the wrist stiffens is during a thrust or defense parry. And if your talking about Japanese Bushido and samurai styles well those our two handed techniques. If your referring to knife hand from karate and Tea Kwon Do I wouldn't make that a predominant element through out this piece for 2 reasons, the first being that a knife strike it a partial offensive technique that is prevalent in number of Japanese martial arts style and isn't a distinct class all its own. The second reason I wouldn't do it is because it will give your character manikin hands and although to you it will make sense but to everyone else viewing it they will think that you just got lazy and didn't want to animate the hands. Now if you have to explain to us why her hands are stiff well then thats a missed success. Remember your audience should be able to interpret the piece with out you being present to explain everything.

[masque]

Robert B., you're assuming a bit too much on the basis of a few poses that don't reflect the overall flow of the animation, which, given that it's all you can see, is understandable, but rest assured there are and will be more hand actions than those reflected in these images. Same is true for facial expressions, which are so far fairly wooden, as right now I'm in the process of blocking moves and nailing the timing -- the detailing will follow.

Keep also in mind that Kata is not a martial arts demonstration, there are many of these to be seen in live action that are far and above anything I could produce. In terms of motion it is, particularly in Act 1, a dance piece, with references to the martial arts. In terms of visual themes, it is about the human form in motion, one translation of "kata" being "form." In terms of psychological themes it's about the indomitable nature of the human spirit, which is not likely to be seen in these images. So, for now, try not to read too much farther into them. It's still very much a WIP.

RE: Hair -- yes I plan to apply soft-body physics to it as much as possible in order to avoid the helmet-head look. As with the cloth sims, this is a fairly complex operation that is best done after all else is locked, part of the detailing of the animation. Hopefully by then there may be some advances in the hair system that will also make this more robust as well.

[Robert.B]

Sounds good man ill keep an eye on you

[Bai Fan]

So I am assuming that since you are translating Kata, you are going off of Japanese martial arts. I will go with that too then. If you are doing knife palm the fingers would be pressed together and yes, straight.

However in your poses it is coming off as laziness since you have not animated the hips, spine, shoulders or clavicle. Maybe I should not have said stiff, but said the poses feel unbelievable.

Other things I noticed are:

You are getting the rubber hose look in the knee deformations (and going back it looks like you are getting some in the elbows), might need to check your weights.

Might want to bump up your fill light a bit and add a bounce light.

You seem really defensive about critiques so I will stop trying to give them now.

[masque]

Not defensive at all, just discussing the situation as some perceive it and as I know it to be. I do appreciate the feedback, but when people start tossing out words like "laziness" as part of their assumptions about how the animations look, without having seen them, and judging only by a few stills posted not as examples of final work but as progress toward a goal, then I get the impression they're making unwarranted assumptions and I'll say so. It's not exactly a neutral word.

You also make rather interesting assumptions about what I have or have not animated. Shall I also post the animation curves as confirmation? Or could it be that in the images shown the effects of the motion on the bones you mention simply aren't very pronounced for that frame, in which case saying that they might need to be more obvious is a valid and useful crit, but saying it hasn't been done due to laziness, is, quite simply, crap.

You should take the time to actually read the posts, because I mention in the one with the last image that there is some reworking needed on the knee and wrist flex weighting, and why that is the case, so your comment is either redundant or condescending, and neither is very valuable.

RE: Lighting: Yep, adjustments to the lighting is one of the goals of blocking the moves and doing test renders, because the camera is moving a great deal and each sequence will need a fairly custom bounce and fill. But the high contrast chiaroscuro is part of the look I want for the piece, so it will still be subtle.

[Bai Fan]

Ok, going through points...

I never called you lazy, so don't get so bent out of shape. What I said is "in your poses it is coming off as laziness since you have not animated the hips, spine, shoulders or clavicle". I am judging your poses from what you post, since I can't judge the ones you don't. I guess it was an assumption on my part to guess that you were posting the key poses instead of secondary or tertiary ones.

If we look at one of the images you posted as an example...




we can see that there seems to be little (if any) rotation on any of the joints in the pelvis, spine, clavicle or neck... which is what I was talking about. The feet and knees even seem to be the same distance apart when comparing it to the rest position.



Don't whine about us not being able to see the big picture, because we are seeing what you show us. If you want us to talk about your arcs, timing and movement, post some animation. When dealing with animation, you should have strong poses, ESPECIALLY for key ones.

Is it pretty unreasonable to expect people to read all the posts of every topic in these forums, and would recommend being a little more tolerant with redundancies. I try to comment in all of the sections, while spending most of my time helping in the critique section and regrettably I don't always read every post in each of the topics.

Bear in mind that the people commenting on here are doing it to help you out, not to put you down or make themselves feel better (for the most part... you get those people every so often) and are commenting on your progress so you can fix the problems and have a better end result.

One final note, I would be interested in seeing a play blast if you feel comfortable posting one.

[Bai Fan]

.

It wouldn't show the image I was referencing in the last post so I quoted yours to see if it would work.

EDIT... Nope, it wont work with attachments for some reason. ... huh ...

[masque]

I can see why, if you assumed that the pose you're citing follows directly from the working stance, that there are no rotations to the hips, spine, etc. But that assumption is just plain wrong, and doesn't justify the statement that there is no animation of those elements. It's like looking at two frames of a chorus line, each with a high kick at its peak, and assuming that the girls are dancing around on one foot. The pose is actually one of the key frames from a 360 spin with a high kick, the "landing," which progresses from there to a further turning. The working stance is never actually used in the animation at all.

Just take the images for what they are. They aren't intended to show the full nature or quality of the animation, they're poses specifically chosen to illustrate or test certain aspects of the model as its being put through its paces and moved toward finalization. Consider them sketches, if a 2D analogy is helpful. Commenting on your impressions is fine, but don't assume that those impressions are 100% accurate in terms of what you do not see.

Oh, and please don't whine to me about all the time you spend helping others out with your obviously in-depth and fully-informed observations -- that's your choice, Charlie. Doesn't impress me, been there, done that. But if you do it for my work, please have the courtesy to read the posts, 'K? Thanks.

[Bai Fan]

I think that is a bad analogy. I am not assuming anything about your animation. I am not even talking about your animation. I am judging your shown poses. When I say it doesn't look like you have animated the joints, I think you are misunderstanding the terminology. I mean that those joints look like they are still in bind pose. Meaning that it doesn't look like you have rotated them for that specific pose. It doesn't have anything to do with the movement or the time line or the other frames. I was addressing the pose.

If you want to use the metaphor of the 2d sketch, then we will. I think you need to push your gesture. If I were to look at two frames of chorus girls kicking in the air I would most likely be able to see examples of weight, contrapposto and balance though the bending and compensating of the body parts.

To reiterate, I was never talking about movement or time, I was talking about the still images and how static they felt.

Ok, I am done. You seem to be closed to help.

[masque]

If you want to use the metaphor of the 2d sketch, then we will. I think you need to push your gesture.

Now that's a helpful crit, definitely worth taking into consideration. Sure didn't read it in your earlier posts, though, which seemed to be full of assumptions about what hasn't been done and not much about what could be done to address your impressions.

'Bye!

[SamC]

Sexy. Can't wait to see it finished.