[Steven Stahlberg]

A little tribute to George Petty here, all in Maya, using my virtual actress (with some tweaks) and one of his pinups from the 30's for reference.

[Novacaptain]

That's very nice steven!

She must have immensely flexible feet...mine don't flex nearly as much. I hear facial expressions in 3D is a complete bitch (the FF move ones weren't even convincing enough) so i'll leave that be. The hair looks a little odd though...seems like there's a bunch of "patches" of hair that were stitched together.

I like it a lot nevertheless; the phone, the pose and colors are beautiful, not to mention your virtual actress...

[ June 03, 2002: Message edited by: Novacaptain ]

[the_monkey]

wow, thats some amazing work steven!!

i dont really think the hair looks natural, but other than that, this is one of your greatest works yet!

keep it up!

[pixelsoldier]

I agree with the comment about the hair, but I think the expression is very well done. Wow... I'm in awe of her.. emmm.. anatomy. I'm glad you didn't make her one of those really boney supermodel-types.

[egerie]

Hey I have a phone like that ! . . . *awe*

[chickensoup]

Hey Steven, I've been a fan of your for several years now, as your anatomy in your female figures have been quite excellent. To the point (and I really hope nobody is going to take any offense to this in this forum, it's just my opinion; because a lot of the stuff in FF, in terms of art wise was awesome), where I wished that maybe you should have worked on final fantasy the movie as well because I felt that your proportions are much more correct than some of the amorphous blobs in FF (not the main actress, but a lot of secondary characters annoyed the heck out of me). The only thing about the phone girl that irks me a bit is, don't you think her foot is painfully over extended? To the point where it seems like her ankle is broken?

-soup

[Steven Stahlberg]

Thanks! I just updated the image with some fixing on the hair.
Yes this image is not totally anatomically correct, that was George Petty's way, he had a knack for exaggeration, and I kinda liked it.

[Vhy]

The anatomical accuracy is amazing.

[edible snowman]

so with your virtual actress, do you just kind of pose her, render it, and then paint over a few parts that bother you?

[Steven Stahlberg]

There's very little painting in Photoshop here, most of the work goes to modeling - I pose her, then bake history and sculpt the geometry to look more like the reference. Mostly knees, butt and shoulder, but I also made the feet smaller and the lower legs longer.

btw that's an Ericophone, known as Kobra in Sweden, used to have a bright red one at home when I was a kid.

[Lunatique]

OH MY GOD.



Damn, Steven, you are improving still!

This has got to be one of the most aesthetically pleasing 3D work I've ever seen. The skin tone....arghhh! Man, just what kind of skin shader did you write??

The hair is a bit ragged. Maybe make it flow more?

The flexed mucles and creases in the skin--are those deformations, or photoshop enhancement?

BTW, a quick Maya question-- The IK and FK in Maya is kina poor, as in, they don't work together well. You have to key the IK, and then the FK, unlike in XSI, Character Studio, Mirai..etc where you can tweak them both together on the fly. Have you found a work around for this annoyance?

I've been having so much fun with the Bonus Game Poly Tools and Poly Power Tools plugins. Have you tried those out? They are awesome additions to Maya's default poly tools.

[Lunatique]

BTW, I would LOVE to see you do one of Elvgren. He's my absolute favorite pinup guy from that era. I dunno why all the fuss over Vargas. Elvgren was the man!

And I dig yours far more than Petty's. Petty's stuff creeps me out with the awkward exaggerations.

[ken]

i second that request for an elvgren pic! awesome work as always, steve.

-Ken

[Malachi Maloney]

How did I know this was a Petty tribute before I even opened the thread?
(In my mind, phone + girl = Petty. I got fuckin pin-up on the brain. :| )

Anyways, nice image Steven. The only crit I have is that I think the hair should be more detailed, more individual strands and such.
Other than that, very sweet.

Take it easy,
Malachi

[scylla]

wow, i absolutely love it...the only thing that really keeps bothering me is the hair....she looks like she hasn't washed it for about a year and its all ikky and oily...but i shouldn't be too harsh, no way in hell i could do anything as close to brilliant as this.

and i like her foot, bet *i* could do that....*tries*

[Icannon]

blasted.

:O

(i love you)

[Gimbal8]

Now that's one fantastic pin-up.

[Steven Stahlberg]

Thank, as usual I agree with all your points, the hair needs more work, and I love Elvgrens work too... but there's so much work left to do if I want to be able to animate something like this... which would be cool too...

Lunatique, I haven't tried those tools yet, I spend very little modelling time polymodelling compared to the huge chunk of time I spend sculpting and shaping and tweaking the high res SubD surfaces. (Not to mention doing the same to all the morftargets.) Where did you get the tools, at the Alias site or Highend3d?

The shader is quite complex, 4 layers. But the biggest help for this smooth look I think was Emmanuel Campin's Spherelight, or a variation of it. (I'm not using the shadow-baking part of it.) It's really a huge improvement over my previous lighting setups.

The creases and such details - some of it is deformations, but I baked the History and modelled the last details by hand. Not much Photoshop here.

About FK/IK nuisance, no sorry I don't know...

[somkeat]

Really amazing!! Mr. Stahlberg. I really like her. She looks so realistic with some stylistic. I would love to be able to do like this one of these days.

[jr]

looks great steven, love how you made her skin look airbrushed.

[Lunatique]

I got em from from A/W's community area, but you can get them from highend3d too. The game bonus stuff is especially awesome since it's got drawsplit, edgepath, facepath, splitface path tools. In your case, you've done all your essential modleing, and just tweaking the mesh, so it's probably not as useful to you, unless you plan on buildng new geometry from scratch.

When you use sub'D, do you experience slow downs in proxy mode like many Maya 4 users? I'm debating whether or not to just build my mesh up to about 80% finished state with just polygons, and then convert to sub'D.

I downloaded Spherelight, but haven't tried it(still concentrating on just modeling, per your advice). But in your pic, the lighting looks like it's got a pretty strong direction to it. Do you have the spherelight as an ambient light, and another directional light?

Wow, those are modelled deformations? It'll look so impressive in animation, with all the proper creases and flexed muscle morphs.

[ June 04, 2002: Message edited by: Lunatique ]

[Steven Stahlberg]

Yes this complex model in proxy mode on my new dual AMD with 3 Gb memory (well only 2 used by Winblows I guess) makes me wait 20 - 30 seconds each time I make a change to it. I never use proxy mode for any longer than I absolutely have to.

Yes I have an extra spot at 0.5 intensity that's the main light. For the rest I used the 128 spotlight option and gave them a kind of general sky/ground color, on this particular image I also added reddish shadows.

These deformations are modelled, but this model won't animate, not yet. Wouldn't that be wonderful? I'm working on it. What I did here was select the SubD after posing it and hit Detach Skin with option 'Bake', which 'froze' the deformations applied to it by the skeleton. (I froze or baked, which is it?!) The animatable deformations got me about half way to where I needed to be. Then I continued modeling.

[kohse]

This is a beautiful homage to Petty. The feet are perfect. If I may make a sugestion, the smile is more Vargas than Petty, I would re-work it. The hair was already covered so I wont go into it. Another option that might look cool, would be to fade the phone cord or even the entire phone (and shoes if you do the entire phone) into a red out line as in some of Petty's later work.

[Torstein Nordstrand]

Ehrm, wonderful pin-up Stephen, traditionally faithful. I don't understand one word of the above post.

If I may be picky, the straps, particularly on her topmost foot, seem a bit artificial..? Maybe they look too thin, I don't know. Or maybe it's because they don't interact more with the skin. Anyways, the airbrushed look on the figure is truly astounding, amazing, so warm, so soft and precise...

Thanks,

[The Magic Pen]

Nice !

[Awetopsy]

well done.

[Lunatique]

Hmmm. There is a remedy for the poly proxy slowdown: Connect Poly Shape script. It was written for Maya Complete users that don't have sub'D, but all the people that use it claim it is more efficient and faster than Maya's own sub'D(plus, it does other things than just emulate sub'D). Many Maya Unlimited users ditched the native sub'D and downloaded CPS instead.

Or, here are a coupld of other methods. I'll just quote the original text I learned the tricks from:

1)"create a polycube and in the input line type "polyDuplicateAndConnect;" this will duplicate the polycube and keep consturction history between the two. Now apply a smooth to the second cube (it should still be selected). Now you have a lowpoly cube that is connected to the highpoly cube. But here is the kicker - type setAttr polySmoothFace1.inputComponents -type "componentList" 1 "f[*]";
The command you just typed will allow the smooth to work on all the faces instead of only on the ones you had at the beginning."

2)"Use 2 viewports with one showing only the SubD surface and the other showing polys. Assign a shader to the poly proxy. Now you can go back and forth between the poly and SubD with ease."

3 Gigs of RAM?!?!?! That's the most RAM I've ever read about in a system.

[ June 05, 2002: Message edited by: Lunatique ]

[yoda]

Hi Steven, I've never seen any of your work before, but this is great! Love it all, the pose, the 'exaggerated legs'. I know you are going for the heart shape pin to kinda reference the background, but have you tried shading it? I think it might look nice with a bit more highlight in it. Looks sweet either way though.

About the hair, which alot of people pointed out. I think it's fine, but how bout if you gave her more of a 30's/40's "do"? Since you mentioned you are paying homage to someone from the 30's? Just a suggestion, you may not think it works for what you're going for. Neat!

-Chuck

[ June 06, 2002: Message edited by: yoda ]

[Leo]

Steven, that's beautiful. And inspiring. The only thing that bugs me is her hair. Looks fake comparing to the rest.

-leo