IND-302 Week 5

This week I dove into the production of an entire character for Poser Pro. To avoid spoiling the story for my lovely readers, I won't be posting screenshots and will be deliberately vague in my descriptions. Screenshots have been taken, and will be posted in later blog entries as the story progresses.

To begin with I loaded the Simon G2 stock character who came with Poser and morphed his body to the correct proportions. I saved the character as an .OBJ and imported him into Cinema 4D (with scaling of 500 to keep him manageable within C4D's units). As with Kari, I made sure to import each section of the body separately by unchecked the "weld body part seams" in Poser.

Using this body as a base, I then proceeded to model the armour and helmet, mainly using HyperNURBS and symmetry objects. I also deleted some polygons from the base character mesh which were being obscured by the armour.

After several hours, I had completed the armour. I then cut it up into pieces corresponding to the character's seams, and named them all appropriately. I then exported the armour and modified character as separate .OBJs.

Back in Poser, I imported the .OBJs separately, and then applied the Simon G2 rig to each in the Setup room. After a few quick deformation tests, I set the armour to conform to the character, and posed the character for testing purposes. I then used Poser Pro fusion to import the character into Cinema 4D where I tweaked the textures using some of C4D's advanced shaders. Finally I did a test render in C4D using the sketch&toon filter, and was very happy with the result.

Meanwhile, I have also been working on a close-up of the character's face beneath their helmet. Since the face will only be required for two or three panels, I have decided to minimise the amount of texturing I do on the 3D model as it will be easier to paint details over the final render in Photoshop.