It’s Sunday afternoon, all the dreadful holidays stealing precious time are coming to an end, so what’s better to start of 2009 than by doing some house cleaning.
I’ve let the axe work it’s way through my folder of unfinished projects with no mercy. It was time to kill some darlings where just too much time had passed, I really didn’t want to work on those anymore.
What I was left with, was a couple of personal projects that have been untouched for some time, but that I’d get much personal satisfaction from to complete. And with the massive axing done, I was left with six projects (in contrast to over 30 unfinished ones) which I hope I can now have a clear focus on and finish them one by one.
With the release of LightWave 3D 9.6 around the corner, with it’s improved hair rendering and new lovely shaders and updated materials, I’m craving to take them for some serious test drives by doing some character work.
So, first out is this female character bust, which I created in one ambitious day back in February 2008. I’ve just spent some time examining the state of the project, going through the mesh and the textures. And here is a render of her current state how she was left in her project folder for almost a year.
The current working state of this model (Rendered with a slightly too narrow DOF)
The modeling is more or less done, but the textures are mostly just blocked in and need quite some more work. I will spend the rest of the day and evening with her, and see how far I’ll come.
What’s left to do to have her completed as I currently see it;
- Fixing a few edge loops in the overall polygon flow.
- Cleaning up the textures and repaint many sections of the current maps.
- Update the shader network to utilize some of the new goodiness in LightWave 9.6.
- Model proper eyeballs and texture/shade them.
- Model and style a hair wig as well as brows and lashes.
- Model a few accessories for her.
- And finally baptize her, she has got to have a name, doesn’t she?
And that’s pretty much it. Oh well, let’s see how far I can take her towards completion today. It will be a couple of entertaining hours, as I love when I have some time to spare for my own projects and character work. Which is also the times when I evolve my techniques the most as well.
Happy 2009 everyone, and I hope this will be a more active year blogging wise for me than the past year.