Medusa Outfit Final... Somewhat WIP 11

Well, I've finally managed to get the outfit to a point where it moves decently enough not to destroy the collar and the hood! WOOT! I stayed up almost two days trying to figure out where I was going wrong in Poser 7's cloth room and the book did not help very much. If there's one thing that needs work, it's the manual to the software. Oy...

Anyway, I had to adjust the collar, buttons, and hood to be constrained portions of the mesh since they were always in contact with either the hair or Miki2's head. While I lost some minor detail with the hood not moving a great deal, it kept it from messing up everything in the area and looking like it went through a meat grinder when it touched the hair. I also did the same thing for the thigh portion of the mesh as it saved a TON of time to calculate the dynamic mesh deformations. The tail was set as a soft decoration with the tip being included in the calculations so it wouldn't make contact with anything else.

The hair... well, not much has changed a great deal with the hair other than I managed to use the above techniques to make it move to match the bends of Miki2's body and to come over the outfit without making part of it explode. Later, I hope to have the hair fixed in a manner that looks faithful to the original character's hair. Though, the same could be said about making a fully original piece and render that entirely in Blender.

Let's see... other than that, there are some texture changes for her nails to match up the original character, eye color was altered, and two snakes were added from www.most-digital-creations.com for their Shadow Serpent object as it saved me some time in creating another mesh (I'll have to make a better one that's actually specific to the series though) with altered textures. I wished I could have added Medusa's vector arrows to better show her as a character, but I ran out of time and was really too tired to draw up additional textures. Maybe later... or next time. XD

Anyway, I think that's it for this one. Time for me to get back on schedule.

Medusa Outfit WIP 10

Well, I found out what was keeping the outfit from working as a dynamic cloth in Poser, mainly the lack of polygons and trying to add parts of it as constrained groups during the simulation tests. Though, I can't seem to keep the buttons from turning into malleable cloth like the rest of the outfit, so I may end up having to separate them to keep them from moving. Also added the finger and toe nail textures to Miki 2.

Other notes: Seems as if no matter what setting I have enabled during the cloth simulation, the hood tends to go through the collar from time to time. On the other hand, since they are all pretty much the same color, it's barely noticeable. The hair textures are pretty much botched and need to be redone along with the UVs. Also, I need to choose a pose that does not force the hood to move so it stays in place and have it collide with the hair so it covers it as well. Oddly enough, doing that tends to result in many ugly messes as it touches the hair mesh, so I'm not sure what to do to cover the area. I also noticed that since the mesh was also colliding with the floor, it seemed to have pushed through her knee, but it was hard to tell prior to creating the render. Oy... I'll need to adjust the post to avoid that in the future.

Next up, better texture maps for the hair and either some of Medusa's tattoos for the arms or some sort of snake prop with dots!

Medusa Outfit WIP 09

Well... I finished the outfit and figured out what I had done wrong with the UV textures without help. Sigh...

Anyway, this is pretty much the finished model. I found that the UV map was altered by mistake when I went to add a texture to a newly edited section on her outfit and Blender went crazy and shifted the points. I ended up having to rework each section's UV maps, materials, and textures to get everything working. The next problem is that this is the render from within Poser 7 and it doesn't import the model and display it like it does in Blender; which is why it looks a bit rough. Then again, on export, the total filesize for the .obj files are only... around a total of 150kb give or take. They're pretty small, and in being so they do not work at all in Poser 7's cloth room. I guess it needs more polygons now.

So... until I can figure out how to get the clothes to move like cloth, this might as well be the last batch of work in progress shots. And I still need to make the hair transparent mapped so it doesn't look like it's one solid piece.

Medusa Outfit WIP 08

Well, this is the latest work in progress for the Medusa Gorgon outfit I've been working on. Yeah, it's been a while and I know I've been slow with it, but meh...

Anyway, I moved the tail up to the appropriated length, changed the hair and tweaked the hood. For the most part, I'm almost done; but, when I was working on the UV mapping for the textures, the entire UV map somehow moved or removed itself and left the parts that I needed textured -- the button and hood -- ended misaligned or the textures no longer show up as I had intended for them. Does anyone know what I did wrong and how to fix it? I ask as whatever happened, it's keeping me from resetting the UV texture mapping or even seeing the vertecies while trying to edit them in the UV editor window. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Medusa Outfit WIP 07

After trying diligently and loosing a ton of time with the hair, I said screw it and modeled only the parts that will be visible after I finish working on her hood.

Oy...

Also started working on her hair textures. Sadly, I thought it would be harder to do.

Medusa Outfit WIP 06

Redid her hair again, this time with a better reference.

Medusa Outfit WIP 05

More work done. This time, I went ahead and redid the hair using flat polygon extrusions instead of a full out box look that was not working. Not sure if it looks much better at this point, but I did manage to get the UV's setup and might experiment with the hair textures sometime later.

Medusa Outfit WIP 04

Well, this is the 4th TIME I've tried to submit this work in progress submission to DA, but it doesn't seem to want to take! I don't know what the hell is going on, but I'll try again. Pisses me off that it took that long to do. Anyway...

I've started on Medusa's hair, obviously prior to creating her hood and morph. For the most part, it's proving to be a bit more difficult to do than I had initially realized and finding a decent hair modeling tutorial for blender, or ANY modeling app, has also proved to be difficult. So, I've went ahead and started working on it the same way I've already done, extruding and moving the verticies into position. It seems that it's working, but I don't know. I'll let you guys be the judge of that.

So, what do you think? :? And does anyone have any suggestions on how to proceed?

Medusa Outfit WIP 03

Relatively minor update, with a collar and buttons! Next up, Medusa's hair, then the hood!

Medusa Outfit WIP 02

Added the tail! Though, it looks like it's a bit low.

Also added better lighting to so it would be easier to see her tail.

Medusa Outfit WIP 01

Well, I've made some progress in redoing the outfit for Medusa. At this point, I have her clothing down and I just need to work on her collar and hood. After that, I need to figure out how to get her hair done.

And the color I set on the base outfit is so I can see if there were any areas of poke through that were hard to identify when everything was colored the same shade of gray. So, don't worry about that!

I guess I should test to see if it works in Poser 7 before doing anything. :lol:

Any feedback on this and what I'm doing would be VERY helpful! ;)