MUCH Better! (heads/faces)

[Destructavator]

Now this one was a piece of cake compared to my past character heads.

With the new test dev release of MakeHuman, a little rendering work from Aqsis, and a few adjustments to a mesh, I was able to put together a low-poly head/face that still retains nice texture detail.

This head has less than 400 total verts, despite what it might look like.

(I've only mapped it from the front so far, which explains the artifacts on the sides.  When I'm done it'll look nicer.)

Thanks to recent developments in the Makehuman software, this took only a few minutes to put together once I figured out just how to go about doing it.  Yes, the days of the old, hard way of making character heads is fading, and much less of a chore now.

BTW, MH software now automatically makes clothing too, automatically shaped to fit the body meshes it exports.

It still needs some tweaks, and of course hair, but it should come out much better than my past works.

[Destructavator]

BTW, this face is still totally CGI generated 100%, so no, I didn't take anything from a photo of anyone from anywhere.

Now to just add hair...

[H-Hour]

Looks very nice.

[Destructavator]

OK, now if I could just find a way to make the hair look as nice as the face...

BTW, this will be the new head for the young civilian boy model, although I eventually plan to have an alternate as well with a different haircut (as well as various hair colors).

[Destructavator]

I remembered that in-game, with the lighting and such, colors of models look different than they do in Blender.

Later on I'll try these heads in my copy of the game with some testing, and after some tweaks I think these might end up usable.

Oh, and the last one on the end is just for fun.  (Hey, around where I live I've seen plenty of youths dye their hair funky colors, it's actually quite common and has been going on for more than 15 years or so in these parts, one of those "fads" among young people that I don't think will ever die out.  Even some adults here do such things, although they usually go for more traditional colors.)

[H-Hour]

My suggestion on the hair is to make it smaller. Even puffed up hair is rarely more than an inch off the scalp. Most hair is around a centimeter.

Also, most hair styles other than a buzzcut or ponytail have bangs. That means you'll need to paint the hair covering the forehead, rather than just starting hair polys from the top of the forehead. I mean that the hair/head should not follow the edges between the "head" polys and the "hair" polys, if that makes sense. The UV mapping will need to allow for this kind of cross painting.

[Destructavator]

My suggestion on the hair is to make it smaller. Even puffed up hair is rarely more than an inch off the scalp. Most hair is around a centimeter.

Also, most hair styles other than a buzzcut or ponytail have bangs. That means you'll need to paint the hair covering the forehead, rather than just starting hair polys from the top of the forehead. I mean that the hair/head should not follow the edges between the "head" polys and the "hair" polys, if that makes sense. The UV mapping will need to allow for this kind of cross painting.

The hair already barely goes any higher than the top of the original scalp, (This kid has a round head,) although I could take the top of the flat top and slightly shrink the sides, front, and back (slightly scale back on the X and Y axis but leave the vertical Z alone).

About the hairline, I think I understand what you mean.  The new UV map should make this possible, I would think (attached).

[Crystan]

Nice. The texture pic reminds me somehow at Guille from Street Figther

[H-Hour]

About the hairline, I think I understand what you mean.  The new UV map should make this possible, I would think (attached).

Yeah, the mapping looks good.

[Destructavator]

Yeah, the mapping looks good.

Actually, you could really help me here - Once I get the colors and shades right so they look good in-game, if you could help me by spending just a little time manually touching up the UV textures to look better and more realistic, that would be wonderful - I personally have no talent or ability hand-drawing or "freehand" drawing/painting stuff, even on a computer with a mouse.  I can easily apply a texture or pattern to a face and then manipulate it, or map a graphic onto something, but when it comes to "manually" making a graphic or hand-painting a texture I can't do it worth a damn.

BTW, I've almost got the neck and arms matching right.  Still needs some more tweaking, but it is getting there.
(pic attached.)

[H-Hour]

Never done hair before but happy to give it a shot.

[Destructavator]

Never done hair before but happy to give it a shot.

OK, thanks, as I said I still need to do some in-game tests to get the tints and shades right, as the in-game render engine always makes the models look different than they do in Blender.  I'm especially concerned about the "red" variant, as I have a feeling that the red-haired version might end up looking too saturated or vivid, but I'll eventually get it right.

Once I get through that step, I'll let you know and provide 2048x2048 source PNGs to work with.  (Of course, by the time they make it into the trunk I'm sure they'll be reduced at some point.)

Hopefully by then the data_source will be fixed in the Git repo, and I could then commit the PNGs directly there.  (I had trouble with the data_source branch earlier, and geever told me in IRC it might be broken at the moment.)