New Recruit: The Strawberry Crew Cut

[brkurt]

Hello everyone. Here is a result of my experimentation with (believe or not) Blender 2.49b, Gimp 2.6, Inkscape 0.48 and Yafaray 1.1.2.
Awfully Cretaceous (even Jurassic) but the integration of these apps in Ubuntu 9.04 is a dream to work with.

Here is my New Recruit, the Strawberry Crewcut. I created 'cartoony' custom eyelashes and used alpha-mapping with transparent shadows for the eyebrows. The latter is really fun, because the closer the camera gets to the face, the better the eyebrows look.

[brkurt]

And here is what the poncho and jammer shorts look like. This was done in GIMP, using Render | Plasma as the background layer. The poncho is Hookers' Green (middle green) and the jammer shorts are Cerulean (middle blue) as the top layer, opacity 50%. I love how the result looks like camouflage!

[brkurt]

Here's the same model, with a different wig, eyebrows, and eyelashes. I'm using an older mesh, and (to me) this is one of the great improvements of the newer meshes. Eyebrows, eyelashes, eyes, and teeth are all better handled as separate objects parented to the same rig as the body mesh.

The wig is a different problem, however. With Blender 2.7x, you can now parent one rig to another, so that a separate wig mesh can be made to move on its own.

I'm going to give this model a nice ponytail (she's growing her hair out).

[brkurt]

And here is the same mesh, with different eyebrows, eyes and hair. I've used Inkscape to create the lip color. Personally, I think/feel that vector graphics is the way to go if your goal is 3d anime and cartoons. Way more controllable than painting in GIMP or Photoshop.

For this character, I used an old eye lash mesh, and then doubled the number of lashes. The eyebrows are done in Inkscape.

[brkurt]

There's been a lot of discussion on several forums concerning facial expressions and visemes. I stand behind the dev team's decision to use poses rather than shape keys. Poses do the heavy lifting, and then you still have shape keys and subsurfing to do fine-tuning.

Here is the same character making a 'Q' or 'W' sound. This is the single hardest viseme to get right, and here, it's all done with poses.

You can try this model yourself: http://www.geekopolis.ca/blender/visemes/gail1_264a.blend

Note: I've used an Area Light, focused slightly under the chin, to check for pose errors. Works great!

[brkurt]

And finally, some clothes. I'm going to upload this outfit into the new Clothes section. Please tell me what format you will need.



Or, rendered in Yafaray with one mesh light overhead, and two area lights aimed at the chest and forehead.
Total design time: two hours.

[brkurt]

And finally...let's add the Jewelled Headdress as an accessory.