Comedy Mask Model

[Sardtok]

Hi,
just finished doing a comedy mask model,
yesterday I did some really bad comedy and drama masks.
But today I made a more cartoony/comical comedy mask,
I spent about 10 minutes setting up the vertices and all,
and about 30 minutes tweaking the mask.

This is my fourth attempt at modeling,
so I would like some constructive criticism.
Myself I think maybe the nose and chin could use some work,
but I am pretty happy with the results:
http://home.no/sardtok/ComedyMask.jpg

I will be using this for my school play's website (or temporary
website anyway),
so I'm not going to put too much work into it,
who knows I might use it for something else some other time
though... ;)

(I copied that from my post in the Carrara newsgroup).
I used Carrara Studio 3 beta for modeling and rendering,
I used global illumination, but could just as well have used ordinary raytracing.
You can notice the global illumination in the light reflected off one side of the mouth of or eyes onto the other.
(It affects the lighting in different ways too, but it's obvious there).
Just so that you aren't confused by the time I spent working on this,
I used subdivision modeling a technique that smoothes meshes that can use small amounts of vertices and still look good.
So here are some stats to clear that up:
polygons: 177
edges: 281
vertices: 100

But it results in thousands of polygons. (At least that's what it looks like in wireframe)...
I could've used a lower level of subdivisions (3 or so instead of 5),
it seems to work exponentially so 5 is pretty extreme, and 3 does have nice results, but at five it looks almost prefectly smooth.

Oh btw.
check out this site:
www.emotioneric.com

I requested a pic of: Gigantic Evening Wood
You'll know what I mean when you've seen the Gigantic Morning Wood hehe... (No it's not porn)... ;)

[Sardtok]

I noticed an error on the model.
I fixed it,
you'll notice that the mask's left cheek looks a lot more natural
here:
http://home.no/sardtok/ComedyFixed.jpg

[Sardtok]

And now, here's the Tragedy Mask as well,
though not as good as the Comedy Mask...

http://home.no/sardtok/TragedyMask.jpg

[Eric]

Wow! Those are pretty darn cool :cool: I can't really offer much of a critque since I have no clue how you did that and don't understand the little you explained, but they look pretty good to me :D

[Sardtok]

Thanks,

Here's how I modeled them
I placed points (vertices) in space and linked them manually,
filled the polygons that needed filling (everything except eyes and mouth) and added thickness to it (basically a copy of what I already had only sized and moved and connected to the first shape at the outermost corners) and then smoothed it.
Most of the work consisted in tweaking the positions of some of the vertices to get the expressions to look better and such.

I hope this explained it better than the first one:
basically vertices are points or corners, it's where edges (lines) connect to, a set of closed edges is a polygon.
Usually polygons are triangles.

There are other ways to model as well,
NURBS, Metaballs, spline modeling and such...
NURBS or vertex modeling where the best choices here,
and I'm not yet familiar with NURBS modeling,
but it's based on having edges made from b-splines (a bezier curve)...

[Sardtok]

Well,
here's yet another image with both masks:
http://home.no/sardtok/Comedy%20Tragedy.jpg
Tried to make the lighting a bit dramatic,
with a red bottomlight and a white light from the top left...

[VxJasonxV]

Those are unbelievable Sard.

Carrara Studio 3? Never heard of it.
Thoughts on MilkShape, 3dsmax, gmax?

[Sardtok]

I've tried MilkShape once,
and I didn't really like it that much, but that was a long time ago.
Maybe you should check out blender?
www.blender3d.com
It's Open Source freeware and has a lot of functionality.
I tried 3dsmax a tiny bit back when it was R3,
I basically modeled one thing using spheres as a basis,
and also did some animating using Star Wars models,
never learned IK then so I did an FK animation of a stormtrooper getting shot in the shoulder (no lasers, just the fall animation),
that took quite some time.
Anyway,
if you are interested in Carrara you can check out www.eovia.com
And if you are still in some kind of school,
then I recommend you buy Softimage:XSI,
if I only had more money right now I would myself...
Heck, It costs $7000 or $11000 dollars ordinarily and you can get it for $500 or $800 if you are a student.

I have yet to try Maya,
I have a Maya PLE on a DVD from a magazine, but I think that version is getting old so I'd better download a new one if I was to try it.
I hear a lot of good stuff about Lightwave, and truespace is another economical option if you don't want to spend all your money on 3d software.

I'm going to be working on an animated short film for a school project (it's one of the biggest and most important Norwegian projects in High School in Norway, most people just write about books or linguistics, but media is also an option and some people make movies, so I thought this could be a fun challenge)...
I have about 6 months to do it,
and I'll be doing the animation and modeling myself so it's a lot of work, also I'll be making the story and such myself (or it's possible that I have to base it on a Norwegian short story or novel)...
I have a couple of stories,
one which I wanted to do initially, but it requires a lot of models and would be a lot of work,
and was meant to be a bit artistic.
A couple of days ago I came to think of some concept art I did once for an e-comic about flying skulls in hell.
And I figured that I could use them for the film so that's what I'll be doing,
so far the story is going to be a bit of a parody of all those bad alien invasion movies,
only here aliens are invading HELL... Ooooh... ;)

As you can see from the first post, I have almost no experience working with modeling and 3d so this is going to be an interesting challenge...
I will put the movie up on the web and I will subtitle it in English,
and possibly later even have it dubbed... ;)