3D Character: Magdalena

Magdalena
was the center of my attention in the 3D world for a while there.
With the goal to create a realistic CG character from scratch I gave
myself a project that spanned many upgrades
and a large number of months. Unfortunately, because of the CPU intestive
nature of cloth simulation, I never got around to clothing this character, so scroll no further if you are offended by, or have never before
seen a nipple.


Polygon modelling: I was very careful to create ‘loops’ of mesh around the eyes, mouth etc, and maintain a clean "quad" mesh. This has allowed for clean deformations and realistic animations in the final rigged & blendshaped model.

Skin
Shader: The skin shader has proved to be one of the most difficult
tasks in this project. Once the basic texture map was painted I used a
combination of techniques to achieve a realistic skin appearance. Because
of its slightly translucent quality I used a sub surface scattering base,
mixed with a custom light angle dependent shader, allowing shadow sections
to be slightly redder. The red helps to simulate the appearance of light
traveling through the skin to illuminate that which is not lit
directly (thus simulating sub surface scattering). This combined technique
also helped to cut down render times without compromising on realism.

Further
Skin Shader work: A separate SSS solution was used for the face
and the fingers, as you are dealing with thin layers of skin that are
far more succeptable to sub surface scattering. (ever shone a torch through
your fingers or into your mouth? Cmon I know you have!)
Specular highlights were added using a basic additive only layer, eliminating
the need for a bump map (which is really quite a crude shader for "instant
gratification" IMHO)


Blend Shapes: So far over 20 Blend shapes have been modeled, allowing a range and combination of emotions as well as phonemes.

Rigging:
This is a rough guide to the rigging process. This has been almost as
much work as the skin shader, but has yielded some very satisfying results.
When areas you plan for at the modeling stage deform beautifully you
get a scary, geeky satisfaction from it. Once everything is set up correctly
and dynamically, simply moving a leg causes the fatty areas of the calf
squash when it collides, or moving will make fatty areas on the body and
the face move realistically. There is a small amount of animation of this
in the showreel, but as a single frame can
take up to 12 hours to render I’ve yet to output any animations at full
quality.