Most of all his mouth is really bugging me. I can't wait to improve that because at the moment it's driving me nuts.

hehe, it looks really good as a thumbnail but as soon as I open it up I get depressed. I will fix!

that is still pretty amazing. a lot of technical stuff i don't understand, but is cool to see this whole process. keep us updated.

I'm starting work on redoing it now. This time I'm starting with a cube rather than a sphere as it makes it easier to keep the topology neat and I started with the neck this time:



I think I'll go for a more pissed off Larry this time, since the previous one turned out pretty happy. Hopefully it will be done by the end of tomorrow. The text might take a while to get right, it might not, I'm not sure yet.

Small update before I go to bed:

I'm currently shaping Larry's head. Although I'm dissatisfied with my previous attempt the one I thing I think I nailed is Larry's head shape so now I'm trying to replicate it.

This is where I'm at:



Most of this was modeled without looking at my previous attempt or my clay model (I couldn't bring the clay model down to London with me, which is a shame). The head shape is utterly wrong. It slopes too slowly at the front and too sharply at the back. It's a raptor head. It is the head of a carnivore, not a herbivore. Tomorrow I think I'm simply going to try to replicate the shape of my previous attempt, just with neater topology.

I don't think I understood very much of that, but I'm really enjoying seeing it come together.

Damn, I probably didn't explain it well enough, but I wanted to keep the word count at a lean 2,900!

Don't worry, it was nothing to do with your writing, but everything to do with how complicated what you're doing is.

Well I've had to wrestle with the head shape for hours to get it even close to acceptable but I'm really enjoying playing with the materials and render settings. This is what is going to take this project to the next level. I'm excited, it looks so much better despite the actual model barely being better.

My goodness that was an awesome post detailing each step.

Please, continue

Aside from the 3D text, which I will likely do tomorrow sometime, I have finished redoing Larry's head shot. I'm happy with this one. It's not perfect obviously but I'm satisfied. I'll do a full write up tomorrow since it's already 12:36am here.

I was hoping to have written up the next part by now but one of my flatmates left for America this morning and spent all night packing so I slept pretty badly and for the entire morning hehe. I've got some stuff to take care of and then I'll get on it.

So, Larry's redone headshot.

This was where I was at at my last update:



I wasn't happy with the head shape. I tried to fix it but realized I'd be better off starting from scratch again. I worked on getting the shape right in two dimensions before making it right in the third:




Eventually, after a lot of mucking about I got something close to acceptable:




I then started work on the mouth. This time I went for a more negative expression:




Next I made the eye sockets a similar way to last time and added eyes and the eyebrows.




At this point I realized I was still unhappy with the mouth and the surrounding area so I tweaked it a bit:




Then I started texturing. I didn't bother UV mapping this time as for this it's just unnecessary. I chose a more vibrant shade of green with less blue this time.




The thing that really seemed to take it to the next level was removing the specular highlights from all the materials except the eyes (specular highlights are just white points of light that make an object look shiny) and replacing it with a setting called 'clearcoat' which gives the model a slight iridescence (where it looks different depending on the angle of illumination, like Kevin's feathers in UP or a fancy car paint job) and is a much more subtle and pleasing effect. It stops Larry from looking plastic and fake.

Next I set up lights which was just simple two point lighting and set the render settings, which were pretty much the same as last time.




Like last time I brought all four render passes into photoshop. I set the ambient occlusion pass to 'multiply' again to bring some shadow to the mouth and add definition to the nostrils and take the glow away from around his eyes. I also did some minor manual clean up of errors caused by my imperfect topology. This time I just used two of the textures I used for the background, setting them to 'luminosity' and an opacity of about 20%. What the luminosity blend mode does is blends the layer based on how light it is, whilst ignoring any color values so it means the textures won't affect the color of my orange background, but they will affect the lightness, giving me a nice subtle effect without looking like I've just slammed a random texture down.




Here's the finished image (not full size):



All that's left now is to make some 3D text, which hopefully I should start and finish today, to turn it into a poster.

I'm happier with this image. There's no totally awful glaring errors like last time and I think the material settings I used this time help elevate it from looking like a bad game model to something actually halfway decent. The topology and expression still aren't perfect but I think it's close enough for me to move onto the main image now.

Looks really good. You've mentioned a few times that the mouth bugs you (when mixing, I always say if I notice something twice it means it needs to be fixed). Sorry if you don't want the suggestion, but it's possible that what is bugging you is that the mouth might not be wide enough. Making it wider might also allow for broader expressions, if that makes sense.

Although I'm happier with the mouth on my second attempt I think you're right. Part of it was a conscious decision, since the final image will have his mouth wide open I wanted to try something a little different. It hasn't worked and you're right, the mouth should be wider. Animation is about caricature and at the moment is about human sized rather than dinosaur sized which doesn't lend itself well to caricature.

Any suggestions and indeed out and out criticisms are appreciated, I'm doing this to learn after all.