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hehe..looks like you're planning something spactacular. really interested how this is gonna come out in the end. lol..you're a show off ;P

thanks guys biggrin

spent a few hours on it friday and saturday night, but most of it is waiting for renders. not sure how many hours i logged on the original head and body...hard to gauge since they're continual works in progress, fix a little here, a little there, modify this or that every time i use it, that sort of thing.

anyway i gave mental ray's hair primitive rendering a quick shot and wasn't happy with the result, seems like it'll take too much tweaking and insane render times to get the result i'd like, so i tested out using a polygonal hairstyle i modeled awhile back that's a little more optimized, using alpha maps.

it too has its fair share of problems and, when calculated with final gather and raytraced shadows, isn't exactly quick to render either. the 600x800 still i rendered here during dinner took 40 minutes, and that's with low quality soft shadows. on the other hand, it's a lot easier to get visual feedback working on it than with said mr hair prim.





anyway, the stuff at the top bugs me most, but i'll probably cover it with a big a** bow so it shouldn't be too much of a problem. since this is for still and not animation i might not need to bother with hair in the back much either.

Good point Jen =) Well, I know it's at least going to be a relatively front-facing pose (or poses with multiple gals), so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on details on the back, (and lo, I've already made sure some of my lazy UV tiling artifacts are on the back side)

So against my own better judgment I spent the past few days wrangling with hair&fur and mental ray. Countless crashes and roadblocks later, I have a much better understanding of how to work with the hair&fur system, as well as its limitations.

But today, finally mostly satisfied with the hairstyle I've been messing with, I seem to have hit another rather large technical roadblock.

See here:


I read in zap's mental ray tips blog that mental ray's fast rasterizer scanline option, when combined with their transparent shadow maps, can make hair rendering a breeze...and it worked great for testing while I was doing all of the styling. The disadvantage is that any sort of raytracing brings this rendering method to a crawl, which unfortunately is at the heart of what makes mental ray's lighting so sexy.

No problem, I thought to myself as I was working on it, I'll just render out a separate hair pass as I have done in days of yore, and the shadows will be composited on to a matte/shadow object, and all will be good. So once the time came to try out a composite render, I applied the matte/shadow shader to everything but the hair, mental ray gave me this cryptic error: "DB 0.4 fatal 041008: attempt to access null DB tag"

Well, after enough searching I pretty much found out that essentially the exact method that makes the hair rendering look so good in so little time is completely incompatible with exactly what I need to composite it with the well-lit, raytraced render.

So I decided to go for the long haul option and raytrace through all ~70,000 hairs...got groceries, made dinner, watched a movie with Spork, and checked it out 2 hours later...looks grainy and strange and covered in weird black patches, like it caught fire or something. I had a half-baked idea about using the raytraced render's alpha channel to get the nice one composited properly on there, only to realize that the ******** up alpha channel (see lower right corner) it spit out appears to be part of the problem.

I suppose I could always render it out and paint in shadows and masks myself, but in this case I will consider that only as a last resort defeat :b Time to try some less orthodox desirable options. You'd think, after so many years, the developers of such mainstream 3d software would have these kinds of problems sorted out, but they're always there, no matter how advanced it gets.

figured out a reasonable solution last weekend - totally forgot about just using the standard native hair renderer, since it can fake skylight now. it's still not ideal, and there are a few matting artifacts around the bows.. (also obviously interpenetrating with the blue bow, lol)...but otherwise it looks surprisingly close to the mental ray fast rasterizer's render. pretty much done styling for now too, woot~ on to the dress!

Made some progress on the dress. Had to take a break for a little while because of an insane freelance project. Anyway, got time to work on this again =)

Not sure if i should add some ruffles around the edges of the shoulder straps... or if she should have a ruffly blouse or something underneath as well.

I imported an .obj of the mesh into Photoshop so Spork can design a dress print for her and preview in realtime :3 I'm looking forward to seeing what she comes up with since it's going to make such a big difference in the render without much work from me, hehe.

Hmm...wonder if she should have a sock print too... at least some ruffles and/or ribbons at the top though.

@Jen: the top of her hair isn't super high...honestly I'm not a huge fan of the giant beehive/Peggy from "Married with Children" look, but I do like it long and voluminous, so I'm gonna leave it as-is for now. If I end up having more than one character in the final composition that might be a chance to design another hairstyle, though I'll probably keep it something more simple and cute.

Blouse is on! Also added a lil ruffling to the sock, normal maps for dress wrinkles, and testing a little color correction for fun. I think I have the most fun with lighting and post-render stuff, all this modeling is a bit tedious :b

A bunch of the ruffles and straps turned white...material snafu I guess when I was separating them out for the normal maps. They should all have whatever dress print Sporkii designs whenever she finishes that though, so I'm not gonna bother fixing them yet.

Next up, shoes and accessories, small details like fingernails...then it'll be off to rigging!

Got 'em both in there~

Sporkii helped out with the poses, yay! I also gave them a few morph targets for facial expressions, so she's going to come up with some expressions too so they don't look excessively robotdoll-like.

It's funny how IRL lolitas go out of their way to try to look like dolls but in 3D we have to try hard to make them not look like dolls. I was thinking the same thing when I was working on the dress deformations too...in real life they want them to be as plain and wrinkle-free as possible, but in 3D I have to totally go out of my way to add believable wrinkles in ><

Oh yeah, so there's clearly no hair here but it's gonna take a bit of work to do so I'm gonna wait until their poses are completely finalized before doing all the hair pass legwork :b

Whoops, I didn't notice that horizontal line near the bottom, it's not a shadow heh.. I think I changed the material on the cube and re-rendered just that bottom region without doing the whole image. Ah well, just a progress post!