Getting to know FiberFX

[artstorm]

I just wanted to share my latest render. I started this at the end of the 9.6 beta cycle to get to know FiberFX a bit better with all the updates it got. And also to dig into the Simple Skin material some more.

Hope you like it. :)

[hdace]

great work!

[Mitja]

The eyes look a bit strange, but it's stilla great image!

PS: what a haircut!

[ranhell]

nice im still trying to get it to look some what decent

[artstorm]

The eyes look a bit strange, but it's stilla great image!

PS: what a haircut!

Yes, the eyes could have used some more work, I guess I lost sight of the eyes (no pun :) ) and eyesockets a bit when experimenting with ffx, but didn't bother to get back to them, I got a bit bored with the image as portrait images are a bit boring but a good experimentation subject. I used the SSS2 shader for the eyes, and with some further tweaking to the settings I believe it will produce excellent eyes. I will dig some more into that with the next character I'm working with.

nice im still trying to get it to look some what decent

Yes, it does take a bit of trial and error to get to know ffx, but after a while it becomes quite predictable. I still have some more things I want to try out and explore in fiberfx and will do that with the character I started doing now, and then I can probably write down a few pointers for ffx. :)

[Larry_g1s]

Very nice go at it. I think it's a bit too high on the forehead though.

[Rhothgar]

The hair is looking very close to real. I think if it was animated with a little blur etc it would be hard to tell. Very well done.

I skipped 9.5 all together but have recently started with 9.6 and just started working with FFX myself. It's good to see something that approaches realism here. I've seen lot's off cartoon characters with hair but...

I think you did an excellent job on the skin as well. I agree the forehead jumps out a little and maybe the hair line could be a little lower but I've actually known women with high hairlines too....not my preference. :)

Can you talk a little about how you did the skin?

I'm working on a digital double for a independent film and I'm trying to work that out. Any tips you could give would be very appreciated.

Good work! :thumbsup:

[artstorm]

Rhothgar: Thanks. Yes, FiberFX is pretty capable, but it takes some trial end error to get a feel of what works - but then it's pretty smooth. I'd change a few things with the hair if I'd go back and update this image as I've continued exploring FFX since and found out some more good techniques, but that will be for the next character instead. :)

About the skin, it's based on the Simple Skin material, which I prefer over fast skin, at least for the moment I seem to get more realistic results with Simple Skin. Will dig some more in Fast Skin in the future, as it should (obviously?) render faster. But Simple Skin renders pretty fast for me as well, as long as you don't mix in ffx shadows - I rendered those separately to keep the render time at a minimum (they can go sky high with that combination otherwise).
Anyway, Simple Skin was the material I used, with a few tweaks to the default values (changed the spec color, lowered the subdermis visibility etc). And then most of the things is driven by texture maps, which is not that detailed I just made some pretty rough painting in ZBrush, and then baked an occlusion map and multiplied over it. I used that map for subdermis and epidermis as well with just some color tweaking to it. And the bump map which I also made in ZBrush, worked fine for spec map with some small modifications. I posted a short breakdown (http://www.artstorm.net/portfolio/elly/) with some more details, perhaps something useful there.
I did very small adjustments in post to this image, so the render is pretty much simple skin straight out of LightWave. I did make an additional back SSS pass with the SSS2 node which I think worked out better for the red back scattering than just Simple Skin. A subtle addition though.
Well, that was about it in a general way, feel free to ask any specifics if you want.

[Garyrw]

The hair looks really terrific...is part of FFX that light 'gleam' over her ear? Or did you have to add that post-render? The ends on the right seem a little blurry and sharp at the same time...perhaps that part of the FFX way? Someday I'll get good enough to do a model like that...it does look great!

~Gary

[artstorm]

The hair looks really terrific...is part of FFX that light 'gleam' over her ear? Or did you have to add that post-render? The ends on the right seem a little blurry and sharp at the same time...perhaps that part of the FFX way?

That's FFX all the way, the light gleam is from the lightning, I did no post-render editing at all on the hair.
Yes, the hair ends "blurriness" comes from Tip Transparency, the default value was way to high for the haircut I was looking for, but even lowering it to almost 0 I couldn't get the hair tips to look exactly like I wanted them to, so there is room for some more experimentation in that area.

[Rhothgar]

Artstorm: Thanks for the breakdown. very helpful. Nice site as well. got it bookmarked.

What thickness setting did you use on the hair? The fibers are very thin...one reason the hair looks so good.

[artstorm]

Yes, that's correct. The default thickness setting of 500% is way to thick to look near properly. I lowered it down to around 15%. For human hair I found everything from 10-50% to work good depending on hair type. 500% feels more like some sort of thick animal hair. :)
And to compensate for the low fiber width I increased the Fiber Qty to a quite high value (very dependent on the amount of hair guides the wig has to start with).

[Garyrw]

Thanks for all the info...VERY helpful!! I have to get that all into the databank for when I try it... :D you mentioned that you did the hair splines in 3DS... was that before or after trying FiberFX?

Really a terrific job. I bookmarked your site as well, nice info on there. Thanks for helping us 'not-so-gifted' artists along! :D

Great work and it's definitely inspiring me to give it a try!

[artstorm]

you mentioned that you did the hair splines in 3DS... was that before or after trying FiberFX?

I've been on the quest to find a good workflow to style hair guides for years. And still am. :) I've used and experimented with the styling tools in FiberFX extensively, but they are still not there yet in my opinion, even with a few workarounds. As this was the first iteration in LightWave of this, I believe and hope we will see a great deal of enhancements in that area with the next LightWave version.
At the moment I've found 3ds max styling tools to be the most artist friendly (it hurts me to say that, I'm not that found of max workflow otherwise) of the different apps I've had possibility to test. They are more or less based on Joe Alter's Shave and Haircut (to bad we lost his LightWave development) and it have everything you need for all the control you'd want to quickly get what you are looking for. And no problem to bring them back to LightWave and use FiberFX strandmaker to convert them to FFX guides.

It'd would have worked to do it completely in LW as well, but it's so much more tedious so it'd take quite some more time and add some more gray hairs to my own head. Truehair was on a good way to bring decent styling tools to LW, but development in that area has ceased (for the moment anyway) and no x64 version yet. Problems I've found with FFX is that in Layout you can only drag the tips of the guides, makes it very tedious to control that way, you want to be able to brush on any segment. Together with no collision detection, selections, backfacing etc etc. And in modeler the only way to get decent control is to edit them guide by guide (mass editing in modeler is too un-predictive), or do it the old fashion way with building the splines by hand and then strandmake them. Any of those works and will get the job done eventually, but takes to much time in my world when the technology already exists to get it done faster.

Styling part aside, I find the rendering in FiberFX to be excellent, and I'm pretty certain that they aim to bring the styling up to par with the next version.