Hello, my name is Geoffrey J. Smith, and I'm a new member of Reallusion! I'm honestly very new to 3d modeling and animation [honestly any for of animation for that matter], and I've decided to participate in this challenge mainly for the opportunity to actually complete and animate a full character, something I've neglected to do for a while, despite having the resources to do it.

My planned project will be a short animation, probably 5 minutes, give or take a minute or two, and will feature a female humanoid I call a Siren, based off a design I did for the Tumblr 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge; pardon the less than spectacular sketch, my artistic skills are still in-development!

The plan is to create a scene told from the perspective of a handheld camcorder, of a man who's lost in the woods, coming across a mysterious pond that is home to a exotic yet alluring being, which proves to be as dangerous as she is beautiful.

Primarily I plan to create an original character model in ZBrush, with the hope of getting trial access of iClone and Character Creator to speed up development [if not I still have Unreal Engine 4, DAZ 3D, and Blender as alternatives], and I may use Substance Painter and Designer too.

I plan on posting this on the Polycount forums [obviously, since its a requirement anyways], so anybody participating on both should probably expect some identical posts between the two forums [aside from the different responses on the two sites]. I'm totally open to suggestions and critiques, and honestly I look forward to any advice that can be offered. I'm so new to this I'm going to have to do some serious learning to get something done in two and a half months!

In the end, I'm not going at this expecting to win, or even be a top design, I'm participating for the sake of sharing my creativity and improving my skills for the future... but it'd be real great if I could win a couple thousand dollars with my monstrous beauty here!

So I've begun work on conceptual development for the character; since I haven't gotten access of the Character Creator and iClone 6 trial for this challenge, I began work with an initial model in ZBrush.

[Again, pardon my rather sketchy quality, I was aiming to get the design done quick!] Began with a sketch front and side views, not perfectly symmetrical, but I'm pretty good at keeping track of shapes in ZBrush, even without reference.

Then I split this into two [roughly] equal sized pics, and used them as reference to build a ZSphere skeleton. I'm a big fan of the works of the late Ray Harryhausen, and tried designing the rig so as to resemble that of one he'd use in his stop motion models. Because of the asymmetry of the drawings, the armature doesn't fit perfectly, which is ultimately alright for me, as like I said, I'm pretty good at eyeballing the proper proportions with or without reference.

Next, I used Adaptive Skin to create a sculptable mesh, which is where I began filling in the general rough mass that I want for the final character. I primarily used a combination of Clay, Clay Buildup, Move Elastic, Smooth, and Trim Adaptive brushes, occasionally masking and transposing to enlarge or reposition parts like the head and arms. Throughout this process I had Dynamesh set on, allowing me to intelligently remesh the entire model with a click and drag of the mouse, a process used to easily form the desired shape, but has to be discontinued once one has settled on the final core shape [which I haven't yet].

[Wonky Head! (;]

Including the 2D sketch at the top, it took me about 2 hours to get to this point, got to remember to time myself when doing these things!

Now some parting thoughts before I post this; I consider this my Plan C for the contest. Plan A is, once I have access to it hopefully, to use Character Creator to make a model with the relative proportions I'm going for with this character, then move it into ZBrush to modify it and apply a new texture map. Plan B is to do the same with a DAZ 3D model, which I plan on experimenting with tomorrow.

Great job! Love the sketch and your work so far. Do you plan on animating it? If you do not know how to rig, I would direct you to Mixamo, where you can us their free auto-rigger. It's pretty good, and they have a ton of free animations.

Thanks! I have Mixamo, and its something I'll consider using; hopefully the digigrade legs won't be problematic.

No problem, and I wish you the best of luck!

BTW: Are you referring to Fuse, or their website? The website contains the auto-rigger. You shouldn't have any problems with this model, since its humanoid.

I didn't know there was any other way of uploading models besides Fuse?

Hey there. Go to this website:

https://www.mixamo.com/auto-rigger

You will need an Adobe account to use it, but its free. The auto rigger is VERY easy to use. You just place circles on the appropriate spots of your model. In addition, the exported model (FBX) can be imported and used in iClone. (This example has no texture, but you can upload a ZIP with your texture files in it).



(BTW: I don't mean to hijack your thread. If you need any assistance, just PM me.)

No no, by all means feel free to hijack my thread, the point of this challenge is to encourage creative cooperation between artists new and old! This will really help, thanks!

Began some experimentation with sculpting her face; it's important to me that she has a nice balance between inhuman but still beautiful... it may sound crude, but if you can image sleeping with her, that's probably a step in the right direction. I took a unmodified female head from Mixamo's Fuse [the older version downloaded from Steam], took it into ZBrush and did some light sculpting using Standard, Clay Buildup, Trim Dynamic, and Move Elastic brushes.



Now this is just a test, trying to take the forms of the original sketch and seeing how they look in 3D. Right now, I'm not happy with the proportions of her face, I'm envisioning something much more petite and lightweight. Also the eyes are too small, and though I don't wont them to be cartoony, or even totally inhuman, they should be more unusual... also have to think whether or not she will have eyelashes, no eyelashes, or some sort of scale as eyelashes. Looking at it now, it feels a little too much like an alien, with nothing indicating she's supposed to be essentially a sexy evolved fish/reptile creature.

This is looking really nice! I need to get my forum page set up over at Polycount, and start posting some ideas.

I feel kind of odd now, because I had also chosen to do a mermaid type character. I think mine is going in a bit different direction though. So I think we'll be able to benefit each other's work.

My "look" will be much less streamlined. More reef than open ocean, I guess.