Female Ballet Pose
- Ankur Nanda
- Apr 19, 2021
- 4 min read
This project aims to create a realistic Digital Female Body in a ballet pose. While observing and collecting references to get a better idea of muscle-sculpting, anatomy, proportions, and posing from the book ‘Anatomy for sculptures’ to start the model from scratch. Interest was build to make the character in pose to get a better understanding of muscles in different poses. The best way to get the basic proportion of the model is to study every muscle of the body part. The scope of this project to be specialized in character modeling, digital sculpting, and texturing.
Along with the understanding of the workflow and familiarization of software like: • Pixologic Zbrush • Maya Autodesk • R3DS Wrap • Mari • Substance Painter • Arnold • Xgen • Photoshop
The project was started by creating the basic proportion of the female body in Zbrush. The motive was to work on induvial muscles separately and adjust them in the decided pose. The references were collected and adjusted using Pure Ref.
During the development of the project of Digital Female body, it was important to understand the anatomy muscles and proportion in A pose character. Also, previous experience in the gaming company helped in learning new ways of sculpting. As started the model, most of the time was spent sculpting shapes of the body from a simple sphere.
Blocking
Each part was separated while adding in one sub tool. It is very important to have a correct base mesh before heading to add detail, so every part has been changed to the direction of the ballet pose.
All these parts have been bought together using dynamesh. The joints were then sculpted to give them a finished look as connecting them had disturbed the sculpting.
Sculpting
Body parts hold different bone structure and muscle flow so, sculpting has been done separately on each part to get a more natural look.
Hi-res
Lowres-Projection
Texturing
Texturing xyz textures are the most commonly used in the industry. Texture maps were generated for the model with the help of these textures. Skin textures have a medium amount of wrinkles and colour variations which matched the skin type of a body of a young woman.
Created Displacement from Alphas for body skin pores
Exported the plane from Maya and imported both model and plane inside R3DS Wrap. With the multi-channel albedo texture connected to the plane geometry, joined the two models to a Select Point Pairs node. This part of the process involves picking corresponding points from model to plane, like the image below. Some areas will not wrap cleanly such as the ears, that had to be cleaned up in ZBrush.
With this technique, texture maps were baked and before starting with texturing few cleanups has been done. These are the baked textures according to the shape of the mesh.
Imported Mesh and Textures in Mari
Textures were implemented in Mari software and projected on a hand-painted skin base layer.
In this timelapse video, I showed how to apply textured skin pores using a generated map from alphas.
After Texturing I applied a displacement map in ZBrush.
After hours of work on the face and body, reaching subtle detailing. The displacement map was imported in ZBrush for final adjustment in layer to generate primary, secondary and micro details. Then the normal map was exported out at 8k using these settings.
Few Renders of hires with applied displacement Map.
Imported the low subdivision mesh into Maya and started by attaching textures for the head and body materials using UDIM maps. UDIM maps are advised to be used by industrial artists. 8k size of texture maps was used for this project.
After a few cleanups, the render settings adjustments were made. It is always better to have variation in renders.
Xgen Hair
I used settings like placing and shading guides from the description. I have worked on separate descriptions like main hair, band_lf, bang_rt, ponytail, back neck, sideburn_lf, sideburn_rt, flyways, modifiers. Still need to work on flyway and modifiers. Also, Uploading a few render passes.
I have written down a few notes on how to start the process.
- Duplicate Mesh and provide lambert material. - Check History and UV Layouts. - Check Height with the Measure tool. Press x for bottom snap and ctrl + shift for the top end and Scale if needed. Because hair nodes don't work properly on the small mesh. - Create New description from xgen editor. - Select placing and shading guides in the description. - Rename collection for group naming and description for the layer. - Add or move guide nodes while using references. - Select layer collection from outliner and give it new aiarnoldhair material. - Set width to 0.015, use spline interpolation - Use Paint to mask and create maps to black. - Use Modifiers to add variations. Example - - 1. Clumping - click clump volumize for a realistic look and avoid the intersection, setup maps and generate up top .4 or .5 to see changes. clump variance = .4 2. Cut - rand(0.0,0.4) 3. Noise 4. Coil - Use new Xgen description to create a new hair layer - Make it less complex and continue the research
Eyeball
Artists have been trying hard to get a realistic eye for the past last few years. It was difficult to grab the workflow to get the quality of realistic eyeball. Researched a lot and did some test on it. This is the result of working on the eyeball.
Wireframe
Albedo
Specular
AOV Render for final output
Final Output
The project did not use the human body as a subject or require sensitive personal data. Texture maps through which the displacement maps were generated have been brought from legal websites. The model has been designed with generic muscle study and does not refer to any specific person knowingly.
The project has helped me improve my sculpting skills and bought me closer to the aim of becoming a good character artist. Using brushes like clay, standard, clay tube, dam standard for sculpting improved the quality of sculpting. Texturing xyz maps were used to generate textures in R3DS Wrap and the clean-up of textures was done in ZBrush and Mari. Worked on Arnold using ai lighting. The road to gaining knowledge is never-ending and I look forward to improving my sculpting and exploring new techniques to get more realistic renders and gameready characters
Credits
References
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