Building my woman!

After finally creating my wedding man satisfactorily it was time to make his wife. I copied the figure to a new project and began adapting.

The Dress: This proved to be a huge challenge, more complicated than I first thought, and although the end result was satisfactory, I would like to practice more to get the effect more fluid. The first difference I found was the colour: the black suit of the man hid a multitude of sins in the final render, and creating him with simple objects (spheres, cylinders, oil tank, etc) worked well as the shaped naturally blended together. However, the white really showed up the joins, so I used this to my advantage by stylizing the dress, making the shoulder spheres more pronounced to create stylized shoulder pads, which looked very effective, if a little 1980’s!

However, the bust posed a different problem, and whereas the shoulders looked good, adding two white spheres as boobs looked ridiculous! The main dress had been easy to adapt with the scale adaptor and I hoped the vertex modelling would be the same. So I had to model the dress with the vertices, the first time I had really tried this. I used soft-selection to get an even ‘bump’, and the effect was OK, but not as smooth as I really wanted. I tied adding a turbo smooth, but although this improved the effect, it was still not perfect.

The Hair: This had been a challenge on the wedding man, and I had created a good luck more through luck than judgement, with the hat helping to hide any raggedness, but with the woman I didn’t have that luxury, as it was all on display. I began with a sphere which I then tried to adapt and it was difficult! However, the effect was again passable, but it is something I will definitely work on further in the future.

Render problems: When I rendered the picture, the hair was invisible, even though there was a back! This was really perplexing and I trawled though the various menus looking for an answer, even enlisting the help of Alan Hopkins who had the same problem. Then I saw it, in the render options: Force 2-sided render. That was it, and everything worked fine. I have to say that I’m finding Max really frustrating with so many options that do not seem to been a logical place, or follow the same logic as the Adobe products that I am used to working with.

Lessons learnt from modelling the woman: Vertex manipulation, rendering options.