Hatsune Miku WIP

[Oscalon]

Yes, that's what MakeTarget is for. And don't worry about thread invasion, discussing how to make things is on topic.

Clothing is tough, especially rigging. The big problem is to have it seem like clothing, not like rubber tubing around your character painted to look like clothing. The best way is to use proper cloth sim, but you have to go outside Blender for that. But even if you are modeling it in Blender, try to think of how clothing would actually go together in reality.

[ChrisSch]

Yup that's very true, always made me give up on armor pieces. The red on my character is decorative cloth, and the brown is representing leather armor, but its all just prototyping so I'm just getting the basic shape of things, I'll add details, do research, and design stuff when I'm serious, then paint it in Substance Painter.

Another thing I'm having trouble with is hair. Coincidentally I tried to make hair the exact same way you did, from particles, turned into curves, beveled and turned into a mesh, but my result was horrible. Maybe because I was looking at it through Blender Render, not Cycles. I'm making for games so I don't think Cycles is of use for me. Not to mention that I have no idea how to comb more complex hair without messing up something on the other end.

How high poly is your hair? If I use this method, I think I'll have to retopo the hair and bake the high poly to low poly version.

This is some quick hair I did just now. And looks great as particles. Not realistic, but great.

And this is when I make it a curve and extrude it a tinsy bit. I looks more realistic, which is also great, but what if I want to have the same look as the particle? Beveling makes it look thicker like that, but the width doesn't start at 10 and end at 0 as I specified with the particle. I've never before used curves or particles.

[Oscalon]

To get it larger once converted to a curve, use a bevel object and taper object.

The hair for this Miku model is made differently from that method. I wanted it lower poly to make it more rig friendly. Here's a shot of my current bangs mesh (re-designed from the original picture here). Note that it is given 2 levels of subsurf (not shown). This ends up being simpler and lower poly. In this case, I'm going for more chunky anime style hair. It may not fit for your needs. If you are making a game model, you want your hair to start high poly, then bake a normal map/texture and put that on a low poly version.

[Manuel]

Oh I can do that? I just started going more into Makehuman instead of just messing around, so do I need to use MakeTarget for that? I haven't even looked at it yet. Or is it enough that I don't change any vertices. I assume the answer is, yes MakeTarget.

We recently posted an official tutorial that explains the basic usage of MakeTarget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X13k7H3dNHo

[ChrisSch]

The hair for this Miku model is made differently from that method. I wanted it lower poly to make it more rig friendly. Here's a shot of my current bangs mesh (re-designed from the original picture here). Note that it is given 2 levels of subsurf (not shown). This ends up being simpler and lower poly. In this case, I'm going for more chunky anime style hair. It may not fit for your needs. If you are making a game model, you want your hair to start high poly, then bake a normal map/texture and put that on a low poly version.

Yes I'm trying to bake it but it keeps turning out too dark, and not transparent like the hair. >.<

Oh I can do that? I just started going more into Makehuman instead of just messing around, so do I need to use MakeTarget for that? I haven't even looked at it yet. Or is it enough that I don't change any vertices. I assume the answer is, yes MakeTarget.

We recently posted an official tutorial that explains the basic usage of MakeTarget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X13k7H3dNHo

[/quote]

Oh my god this is awesome! My elf ears.

EDIT: Can we add/remove vertices? I'm assuming no because it didn't work for me. Also can I load my own Makehuman model and make targets on it?

[joepal]

EDIT: Can we add/remove vertices? I'm assuming no because it didn't work for me.

No, this is a hard limitation: The base mesh needs to have exactly the existing vertices and faces. You can't add or remove vertices.

If you need to add geometry, you can implement the extra vertices as clothes. This is, for example, how teeth, tongue, hair etc works.

If you need a lower resolution mesh, you can get it via a proxy.

But the base mesh has an exact density.

Also can I load my own Makehuman model and make targets on it?

In part 2 of the maketarget tutorial we'll demonstrate how to make targets that build on or presuppose other targets. Basically, you load the applied targets and start modeling from there. For example, the breast modifiers make very little sense on a neutral/male character: you'd want to apply the female modifiers first, and then model the breast modifiers.

[ChrisSch]

EDIT: Can we add/remove vertices? I'm assuming no because it didn't work for me.

No, this is a hard limitation: The base mesh needs to have exactly the existing vertices and faces. You can't add or remove vertices.

If you need to add geometry, you can implement the extra vertices as clothes. This is, for example, how teeth, tongue, hair etc works.

If you need a lower resolution mesh, you can get it via a proxy.

But the base mesh has an exact density.

Also can I load my own Makehuman model and make targets on it?

In part 2 of the maketarget tutorial we'll demonstrate how to make targets that build on or presuppose other targets. Basically, you load the applied targets and start modeling from there. For example, the breast modifiers make very little sense on a neutral/male character: you'd want to apply the female modifiers first, and then model the breast modifiers.

Ah I see, so the only problem is when you wanna make a change that blends to the skin. Such as a tail. My first thought after the elf ears was horns, so I guess I'd do that as clothes. And yes the reason I asked about loading my own Makehuman model was because I wanted to make some breast targets. Since the 1.2.0 version isn't coming for another 7 months, and this is so easy, I thought I'd give it a shot myself.

But I'm super excited about v1.2, seeing as how there's plans for even anime.

[Oscalon]

New WIP Shot:

[ChrisSch]

Awesome! Can't wait to read the details on the blog.

[Oscalon]

It'll be some time yet. Once I have it all done, I'll be doing a breakdown of everything I used and the general theory. But I have a fair amount of rigging problems to solve first.