A few notes about the pose sheet (I know its not a complete model sheet, so don't flame me about that):
(1) The outfit was originally all blue, but Marvel did the solid-blue outfit to death times four (well, 3.5, since Ben only kept his pants). Yellow makes it a more Wolverine color set, but there are only so many combinations of primary colors, okay? Also, yellow fits in with the back story.
(2) The face is a texture, but it is generated in a 3D program for animation. This makes it a two pass rendering process, but a quick one. I got this idea from my tour of the (now defunct) Disney Florida animation group. They showed us a preview of the (then) unreleased Mulan, and explained some of their tricks in the Caps animation system. If you keep the camera movements to a minimum, you can pull it off.
(3) The nose. Yes, it is part of the 3D model, constructed to look like a pen illustration. It hinges on a control bone, so it can be pushed to the side for the proper perspective, depending on the shot. Example: If you wanted to do a straight portrait, the nose would be angled out 10 to 15 degrees so that it would read properly. Again, a small amount of work for a better render.
(4) The boots and gloves are white. Yes, they look black, but black boots with black shading look, well, black. By making them white and giving them a really bizarre shading profile, they look black with specular highlights.
(5) Line weights. In a tip from the Scott McCloud books, the line weights surrounding the character is twice as thick as the detail lines. This doesn't make much difference here, but in scenes with a busy background it makes the character stand out. Scott has some other psycho-technical info, but it just looks good to me. (This is another two pass technique. That makes three passes so far. The final images will probably be around 5 or so. Let's hope they render quickly!)
Enough for today. Please hit me with comments. The more critique, the better!
Kelvin
Addendum May 7
Here are a few shots that show the issues and workarounds with the toon shader. (Yes, I know one knee is backwards in one shot, and the geometry of the chest is all askew. That's why they're outtakes.) The boots, shown here in closeup, had a white line on them for detail that didn't look very clean. A lot of the old DC and Marvel comics just had them black, since they couldn't do a lot of fancy stuff in the old four color system.
The image to the left is a standard render, showing the true colors of the gloves and boots, and all the ugly geometry. Also note that the nose color is off, since it is a truly flat piece of geometry and the face is curved, thus the shading difference. I thought a more casual pose would uncover some flaws in the model, and boy, was I right!
Finally, a standard shade in a a traditional pose. Note how exaggerated the geometry had to be to get it to read properly in a 2D render. This is not supposed to be the new Wonder Woman starring Dolly Parton. I'm still tweaking to get things to behave more consistently.
Also again note the nose shading, etc. I really like this pose. Its got a lot of the character's personality in it.
Okay, I'm done posting reject images from the morgue.
'night one and all.
4 comments:
I'm certainly no expert...but I like the look. Well done!
Of course, John Hodgeman is the only real expert.
For the boots, would it be too render-intensive to make them black + reflective, and have a self-illuminated white panel to the side of the camera?
Kind of like what one would do rendering a car to show off the glossy curves?
It's a neat solution.
Its not the render time, but the render method. The toon shader limits a lot of what you can do with reflections and specular highlights, etc. The white specular highlights on a black boot just didn't work right, so I tweaked the settings and found this bizarre setting using white as the base color and pushing the shading settings to their limit.
I'll try and dig up a copy of the original and post it for comparison.
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