Human Progress

[Tobian]

That looks creepily wet! Lovelly test, and yes I can imagine those headaches all together create a massive PITA because it's not always possible to 'fix it in post' when there's layers of issue. Great result in the end, if a bit 'wet' looking and grainy of course.

[Carm3D]

Excellent results Chris! I'm honored you used my tutorial!

[hrgiger]

Excellent work Chris.

[allabulle]

Fantastic work!

[jonny]

Hi Chris, nice work. I thought I'd point you in the right direction for a couple of your issues (although I'm a bit surprised to see my knowledge is still relevant).

7. Eyelid morphs double up when the eye looks down, so unfolding of the lid can only occur during blinks or eye down, but not both. Basically I need non additive morphs (is this even possible?).
8. I tried to soften the eyelash/brow insertion by apply transparency to the roots using a weight map and gradient, but this has less effect when subpatch level is turned up. At higher levels there doesn't appear to be any transparency at all.

7. You can add an expression to apply a corrective morph when "Both" blink and eye down are active. The corrective morph basically being the negative of the doubled part.

8. Make sure your weight map includes 0% for the non-affected points. If it does, when it's subdivided the weight will remain evenly spread. If it doesn't, only the points with actual values will retain them when it's subdivided.

[Chris Jones]

Thanks everyone!

A small amount of flickering/grain perhaps between the nose and eyes in the specularity...It´s the only thing I can remark on, but I think you mentioned it and can improve the render later.

Yep, it's having particular trouble resolving the eyelash shadows in that spot. I think cranking the samples way up would probably rectify it.

Have you ever thought about using a rendering service for the render times?

Thought about it, don't have the budget...

I'm honored you used my tutorial!

Thanks for sharing it, hope you approve of my little curves modification.

7. You can add an expression to apply a corrective morph when "Both" blink and eye down are active. The corrective morph basically being the negative of the doubled part.

Yeah I've done that in a few places, and I tried it in that area but it's quite the ordeal. There are bones and morphs working together, and knowing where to move vertices in Modeler so that they wind up in the right place in Layout is an extremely slow going, hit and miss affair (also bearing in mind that there are 5 eyelid morphs now, and jumping back and forth from Modeler is a surefire way to cause crashes). If there was ever an argument for unification, this would be it...

8. Make sure your weight map includes 0% for the non-affected points. If it does, when it's subdivided the weight will remain evenly spread. If it doesn't, only the points with actual values will retain them when it's subdivided.

Those vertices are reading as 0%, but if I understand correctly, you're suggesting I should actually manually apply the hair root weight map to them, and set it at 0%? If so, then that could explain some other problems I've had with weight maps for the longest time...

And as for #9, the other day I tried rendering a still with normal DOF turned on and DP DOF turned off (forgetting why I had DP DOF there in the first place), and it included the fibers. It was definitely omitting them before, so who knows what's going on there.

[BigHache]

Great looking test. What are you looking like for renders times per frame (average) on this last go?

[wyattharris]

Excellent render, love the presentation. Every update from you gets me more excited.

[jonny]

Yeah I've done that in a few places, and I tried it in that area but it's quite the ordeal. There are bones and morphs working together, and knowing where to move vertices in Modeler so that they wind up in the right place in Layout is an extremely slow going, hit and miss affair (also bearing in mind that there are 5 eyelid morphs now, and jumping back and forth from Modeler is a surefire way to cause crashes). If there was ever an argument for unification, this would be it...

It shouldn't be that difficult, although bones can complicate it. If you have morphs competing with each other, in many cases you just need to create a morph that is negative another (Apply Morph -100% or whatever percentage is appropriate). It can require some tweaking, but Apply Morph and various percentages will get most of the job done.

You don't need to be in Layout for most of this. You can create a temporary morph in Modeler that is the same as what's in Layout by Apply Morph x whatever morphs are active in Layout, at the percentages that are in Layout. This will give you the exact same result as Layout (minus bone deformation). Then you can make your adjustments manually (create a copy, adjust the copy, remove the copy from the original). Morphmapmixer was a useful plug-in to help create a blend of morphs using sliders in Modeler.

Another plug-in that helps with all this is called "Mask Morph Copy". It will copy a morph based on the percentages of a weight map. Very useful as you can account for bones more easily and quickly target areas.

After all of that, the amount of jumping back and forth to test and tweak the results shouldn't cause problems.

Those vertices are reading as 0%, but if I understand correctly, you're suggesting I should actually manually apply the hair root weight map to them, and set it at 0%? If so, then that could explain some other problems I've had with weight maps for the longest time...

Yes. It's a bug that I always felt could be useful in the right circumstance, but never found that circumstance. It's easy to see and test by "Freezing" the geometry in modeler.

I still use Modeler 9.6 for most of my modeling, but it's a bit disappointing to see the same bugs causing the same problems and the same work arounds being necessary 10 years later...

[RebelHill]

Those vertices are reading as 0%, but if I understand correctly, you're suggesting I should actually manually apply the hair root weight map to them, and set it at 0%? If so, then that could explain some other problems I've had with weight maps for the longest time...

There's a difference between a weightmap existing on a vertex at 0% value, and that map not being applied to a vertex at all. It matters in terms of bone influence, and classic texturing methods, but there is no such distinction in nodal.

[Oedo 808]

This work is genuinely impressive, too classy to lavish cheap praise upon... though it is superb (I'm the cheap one). Have you had a chat with any of the LightWave Group about the highs and lows in the workflow of getting to this level?

I Look forward to seeing any more progress.

[Ztreem]

WOW! This work has gone from awesome to insane. (in a possitive way)

[hrgiger]

This work is genuinely impressive, too classy to lavish cheap praise upon... though it is superb (I'm the cheap one). Have you had a chat with any of the LightWave Group about the highs and lows in the workflow of getting to this level?

I Look forward to seeing any more progress.

agree. when you see work of this quality, I would like to think that LW3DG would be asking people like Chris, what could be better about LightWave that would have allowed you to more easily reach this level of quality. My fear would be that this kind of work would be promoted as an example of the quality of work you can get out of LightWave as if these results are typical. Chris has made it clear how many hoops he's had to jump through to get the results he has.

[lardbros]

I agree with this too... I hope LW Group are helping him, but I don't think they are.

Newtek need to look after the talent like this and lick-*** a bit. Otherwise, like William Vaughan and Pisong etc, they will leave for pastures new and more/easier functionality.

Not saying it will happen, but these are clearly the biggest stumbling blocks when using LW for photoreal human animation... and they need to listen!

[djwaterman]

Congrats to Chris on the RedShark post. Seems to have really got some attention there.

http://www.redsharknews.com/post/ite...ate-an-eyeball