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Species Cheetah
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Let us begin my latest tale...(Lotsa clickable links, by the way)
I've been wanting to change my old Character Model for a long while now. It was made in using Genesis 2 as a base, which is already kind of outdated now. And the reason I wanted to jump to Genesis 3 was simply the newer cool stuff being sold on Daz's website. So I recently began trying...
My first attempt was to transfer my original model to Gen3 using Transfer Utility and some tutorials. It -almost- worked out, as you can see HERE. Mainly the eyes were broken. However, they were VERY, very broken. Without the head, you can see it a bit better. Just need to fix that geometry on Zbrush or something, right? Well, maybe. However, my current skill level isn't good enough to fix THIS.
So after countless attempts, fix attempts and forum reading, I gave up and decided to re-model it. I attempted using some other morphs, like Cat World and the lion head morph from Creature Creator. Left it all ready to sculpt and called it a day.
The following day, however, I found that the eyes were STILL deformed. In fact, any face morphs I tried broke them. After a couple of hours and almost giving up, I was reminded of the figure Cheetah Girl, which I'm fairly sure was made by
hattonslayden. Since I dislike using unaltered anthro figures, I went straight to work. First task was to change the original head to something I liked more. And I did, indeed, Like it a lot more. The rest of the day (that was...last Friday, July 14th) was spent on little corrections, hands & feet (especially the feet, since they were hideously broken).
Next was the part I both love and hate in 3D: texturing. My old textures, such as tiger and leopard were no longer usable. The reason is that the UV maps (how the software reads where to place 2D textures in a 3D figure) were incredibly different, which resulted in sheer brokens.
So I spent Saturday researching texturing. From what I recall...
Zbrush: No idea what I'm doing. I don't even know how to load the current textures in!
Photoshop: hideously slow for projection painting (a.k.a. painting straight on the 3D figure) and had some weird bugs like textures not updating after being changed.
Substance: I literally have zero idea what I'm doing. None at all.
Mudbox: what I used previously, but I found it kind of...imprecise, somehow. Especially for brush details.
The last one I looked into was Quixel Suite. It seems like a really powerful tool, after seeing a few tutorials, but then the content started getting deeper and I literally got a headache from the amount of info to process. It seemed pretty straightforward for my low-end purposes: load model mesh, select material groups (skin, hair, etc), apply texture to it, use "dynamask" to do additionalk little details (maybe like spots on fur?). The problem strarted straightaway, as the software warned me that my figure had 61 groups. The software had to load each one, bake several maps, then integrate them all...I gave up after 30 mins loading. Eventually, I managed to reduce that to 17 groups. But then, the software crashed so hard, I had to reboot. Yay.
At night, while talking with my bff kitteh
jaira, I decided to go with Mudbox again the following day. In the meantime, played around with the figure and found a Gender-Bending morph and re-applied my broken hair fix, which I also did (and, weirdly, came up with while sleeping) a few days prior on my old model. Basically, broken hair + no ears morph applied to hair = fixed hair!
Also had an amusing bug where I can't use both morphs on the character at once, or else creepy shit happens.
Yesterday (Sunday), despite constant interference from parents, I got several photos, adjusted them in Photoshop so as to not make them too different from each other in terms of brightness and saturation, and went on to work.
After a few frustrating hours, I ended up using almost entirely one photo, seen there on the lower right. Then applied it to my modded figure, and voilá!
After a couple more adjustments (such as the face muzzle & missing black lips), I rendered the two images in this post. The first is regular Iray, the second is part of my recent attempts to use the Reality Renderer.
So yeah. Fun. Can't wait to get started on the next. :B
I've been wanting to change my old Character Model for a long while now. It was made in using Genesis 2 as a base, which is already kind of outdated now. And the reason I wanted to jump to Genesis 3 was simply the newer cool stuff being sold on Daz's website. So I recently began trying...
My first attempt was to transfer my original model to Gen3 using Transfer Utility and some tutorials. It -almost- worked out, as you can see HERE. Mainly the eyes were broken. However, they were VERY, very broken. Without the head, you can see it a bit better. Just need to fix that geometry on Zbrush or something, right? Well, maybe. However, my current skill level isn't good enough to fix THIS.
So after countless attempts, fix attempts and forum reading, I gave up and decided to re-model it. I attempted using some other morphs, like Cat World and the lion head morph from Creature Creator. Left it all ready to sculpt and called it a day.
The following day, however, I found that the eyes were STILL deformed. In fact, any face morphs I tried broke them. After a couple of hours and almost giving up, I was reminded of the figure Cheetah Girl, which I'm fairly sure was made by
hattonslayden. Since I dislike using unaltered anthro figures, I went straight to work. First task was to change the original head to something I liked more. And I did, indeed, Like it a lot more. The rest of the day (that was...last Friday, July 14th) was spent on little corrections, hands & feet (especially the feet, since they were hideously broken).Next was the part I both love and hate in 3D: texturing. My old textures, such as tiger and leopard were no longer usable. The reason is that the UV maps (how the software reads where to place 2D textures in a 3D figure) were incredibly different, which resulted in sheer brokens.
So I spent Saturday researching texturing. From what I recall...
Zbrush: No idea what I'm doing. I don't even know how to load the current textures in!
Photoshop: hideously slow for projection painting (a.k.a. painting straight on the 3D figure) and had some weird bugs like textures not updating after being changed.
Substance: I literally have zero idea what I'm doing. None at all.
Mudbox: what I used previously, but I found it kind of...imprecise, somehow. Especially for brush details.
The last one I looked into was Quixel Suite. It seems like a really powerful tool, after seeing a few tutorials, but then the content started getting deeper and I literally got a headache from the amount of info to process. It seemed pretty straightforward for my low-end purposes: load model mesh, select material groups (skin, hair, etc), apply texture to it, use "dynamask" to do additionalk little details (maybe like spots on fur?). The problem strarted straightaway, as the software warned me that my figure had 61 groups. The software had to load each one, bake several maps, then integrate them all...I gave up after 30 mins loading. Eventually, I managed to reduce that to 17 groups. But then, the software crashed so hard, I had to reboot. Yay.
At night, while talking with my bff kitteh
jaira, I decided to go with Mudbox again the following day. In the meantime, played around with the figure and found a Gender-Bending morph and re-applied my broken hair fix, which I also did (and, weirdly, came up with while sleeping) a few days prior on my old model. Basically, broken hair + no ears morph applied to hair = fixed hair!Also had an amusing bug where I can't use both morphs on the character at once, or else creepy shit happens.
Yesterday (Sunday), despite constant interference from parents, I got several photos, adjusted them in Photoshop so as to not make them too different from each other in terms of brightness and saturation, and went on to work.
After a few frustrating hours, I ended up using almost entirely one photo, seen there on the lower right. Then applied it to my modded figure, and voilá!
After a couple more adjustments (such as the face muzzle & missing black lips), I rendered the two images in this post. The first is regular Iray, the second is part of my recent attempts to use the Reality Renderer.
So yeah. Fun. Can't wait to get started on the next. :B
Category Artwork (Digital) / General Furry Art
Species Cheetah
Size 1200 x 971px
File Size 1.84 MB
Listed in Folders
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