I could chop the hand at the knuckles and make her fingers from scratch. Or I could cut the hand into slices to make fingers out of them. Either way, she should end up with five fingers. Here's a progression of the finger modeling. It's not so much hard as it is tedious and time-consuming.
If you get bored with making hands like I just did, sometimes modeling a face can spark interest in continuing further work on a model. I just happened to have this one lying around.
The first image shows a poly mesh that is, of course, smoothed. The second image shows the control lines used to make the poly mesh.
Amapi Pro 7.5 had outlived its usefulness. Athena was imported into Hexagon 1.21 afterwards.
NOTE: From this point on I'll be displaying the control lines on the smoothed object for better visualization.
Some of the wires were removed from the head before attaching it to the body. It helped to make a better fit onto the neck. I can always add more wires if I need more detail.
Here's Athena at this point. Her body has been softened a bit. But that doesn't mean she'll stay that way. My modeling taste seems to change each time I open her file.
Here I've added some detail to her neck, shoulder, and armpit areas. And yes, gave back some of her "If hips could kill" look. The backs of her knees were re-done also.
More neck work.
And added some detail to the front.
I decided she was a bit harsh in the front. So I softened her a little. I also moved the star that was on her shoulder down closer to her armpit.
Added definition to the collar bone area and to her face. Also re-ran wires where her thighs meet her hips.
In search of the perfect butt. Took awhile to simplify the wiring. For all I know, its facets will bust apart once I start bending her legs. For now though, she looks cool just standing there. Hopefully it's not too big, because she'll need to fit into her battle armored powered suit.
I caved. Due to pressure applied by the fake breasts crowd, Athena had some nipple-relocation surgery done.
I'm finally getting an idea of what face she'll have.
Added eyeballs and adjusted her eye sockets and pulled on her cheeks and neck a bit. Still playing around with her breasts. Trying to make them more believable.
Playing around with a helmet design. Not sure yet what kind of visor to give it, if any.
I thought I should fix her mouth first before making her outfit. I didn't want her face looking at me the whole time the way it was.
Let's review. Athena's front so far.
And her backside.
Ok. I had the urge. I had to try out Athena just for once with huge breasts to see how she would look with them. So of course I had to slap some real skin on her and turn the lights down.
This trial start at creating procedural skin was rendered in Carrara Pro 5.
Went back to the original body shape. Added more pink to the skin and tested some lip and nip textures.
I just now realized I wasn't adding shine to her skin.
Here's a test render of Athena in a kitchen scene from another draft I've been playing with. The skin reacts well to the morning Sun hitting it.
I thought I'd try another indirect lighting shot of Athena to test her shine again. The nips were re-modeled.
Here's a close up showing the slight bumps on her skin. Also trying a different texture on her nips.
Added more layers of fractal noise, turbulance, and color mixing.
Decided to scale back down the skin bumps. Reduced the freckles and made them less orange.
These are other skin tests that may have be done all in vein.
Ok. Now we're getting somewhere. I think I can finally tell what this is supposed to be a model of.
Toned down the veins still more for a final skin result. And simplified the geometry for the nips. A wired view is included.
Here's her back side so far.
I made her skin a bit more dry and pale looking. In other words, just a hint more natural color.
Added some mood lighting.
This HDRI brings out the skin's leathered look.
I just got off the Internet with Eric from Digital Carvers Guild about making his Anything Goos plug-in recognize the edges of Shader Domains used in Carrara Pro 5.1. So now I don't have to separate Athena's nipples from the rest of her body for texturing, which created hard edges around them. The procedural texture can now treat her skin as one piece finally while rendering.
I changed her boobs while I was at it. Here is an HDRI render (no SSS).
I've learned a lot about Carrara Pro 5.1's procedural shading while creating this skin for Athena. This is its current look at the moment.
And here are the skin's basic settings. I ended up using a multi channel shader for this project. A highlight of 6% and a shininess of 3% were chosen. Note also that there is a bump amplitude of 15%.
The color is the main ingredient for this shader. Here is an expanded view. Many levels are being used here to make this skin look as real as possible. The first level of this procedural skin is a base skin pigment. It is a mixture of two colors with noise used for blending them. A brightness of 250 was used here to make the lighter pigment dominant. A value of 100 would mix the two pigments evenly. NOTE: A global scale of 1 was used here to tighten up the noise pattern and shrink the color variance down to pixel-size.
On the same level as the base skin pigment is the vein color. It too is a mixture of two colors with noise used to blend them.
Mixing both the veins and the skin pigment together using a global scale of 1 here creates the look of translucent skin that's covering the veins.
A fractal pattern was chosen for the veins to follow, which are then cover with another layer of the base skin pigment. The higher the contrast setting, the more pronounced the veins become. Note that "Invert" is checked off here. Setting the blender to none removes the veins.
A turbulence generator was used to add freckles to the skin. A global scale greater than 2 can produce larger freckles. Setting the blender to none removes the freckles.
Some fractal noise was needed to create moles for the final procedural skin level. A higher brightness will create larger moles. A darker brown color can be used to make darker moles. Setting the blender to none removes the moles.
Cellular bumps are added for more realism to the skin.
This skin shader will work great on figures that are 5 to 6' tall, using best anti-aliasing and 1 pixel accuracy for both object and shadow when rendering.
To remove the goose bumps and turn them into skin pores instead, the cellular bump settings found in the basic settings for the top shader need to be changed to a scale of 6% and a bump amplitude of -15%.
