Female Head (Curvy 3D 3.0)

[Simon]

Sculpting another head in the 3.0 Beta.

I used perspective backdrop photos as reference.

While sculpting the mesh sometimes got too dense and hard to smooth (Press 'A' to see the trigangles) - so I just selected part of the surface with the Mask brush and used "Reduce" to 75% to remove the shortest edges, then "Relax" to even out the spread of triangles in the mesh.



Note how Curvy 3.0's adaptive subdivision makes the mesh denser near details, and more sparse in flat areas.

[Markku]

Very beautiful! How those single hair strands were done?

[Simon]

You can use texture maps with an alpha channel (in the "Base Colour" texture slot only). I used a stripy TGA file for the eyelashes and hair. Just remember to tick "Fog" in object properties to use soft blending on the alpha channel (otherwise you get a hard edge effect).

For the lashes I used a Loft, and for the hair I used Lathes - with one in solid black, and a scaled up copy with the Lash texture.

[pior]

Regarding texture maps with alpha channel for transparency : Is it possible to paint on the alpha of such TGA maps straight within Curvy using the existing painting toolset ?

[Simon]

Painting on Alpha has been on the wishlist for years. I think it stayed there because I didn't support saving images with alpha. (Since then I have added limited TGA saving support for Sceenshots)

Would be great to paint on alpha - then turn the painted on surface into a new 3D extruded surface.

[pior]

Oh haha you're pushing it even further then hehe

Alpha could aslo be another slot altogether btw (alongside bumb, base color, curvymaps) - doesn't necessarily have to be embedded in the TGA. Might make it easier !

[Simon]

That does make sense, especially as only Diffuse Texure and the Diffuse Lightmap use alpha, but it is still handy to load in both at once in a texture (I guess it could get split into separate maps if you edit it).

(N.B. Lightmap alphas are currently broken in 3.1.1 - they are very useful for making smoke effects and are fixed in 3.1.2)

On a related note - I am aware it is a bit confusing having separate brushes for paint on vertex/paint on texture. And I could even do with more variations for painting on the occlusion layer (and alphas) I guess I could add those layers as "Extra Texture" slots too so you can click on one to paint on just like for the textures.

I'm thinking of splitting the materials panel into tabs - with geometry options separated from texture maps, so that would make room for the extra layer slots.

[pior]

Yeah totally - Material editing is quite a subject in itself !

I really like the original features you have in the current panel - like,how holding down left click opens the recently used mat spheres for quick access, for instance. Very elegant !

But yeah it's true that some other aspects could benefit from a more conventional approach - for instance when I load a texture map or a sphere map and then edit them within Curvy, there's not much information telling me what happened to my original file - is it being overwritten, or replaced by a new instance ? Where are the source files and the saved files located ? and so on...

The paradigm of always displaying the inputs of the material of the object currently selected is very nice too - it makes for very fast edits. But besides that I think there should also be some kind of traditional material list and editor, allowing to simply assign a given material to one or many different objects, to edit a given material regardless of which object is currently being selected, and so on. Lots of things to think about !

[edit] - tried loading a TGA with an alpha channel, but it showed as a regular opaque image when I applied it as base color ... Is there another display setting to turn on to enable transparency ?

P

[Simon]

You have to tick "Fog" in object properties to get a soft edge alpha effect. Otherwise it should give a sharp edge when loaded as base colour.