Long story short - I think the geometry is close to being finished. She's rigged for Poser, although there's still a lot of fine-tuning to be done on the joint setups. Once I've finished the teeth and maybe done some more small fixes, I'll UV-map her and... well, what exactly?

See, the thing is, I'd be more than happy for people to have her, make lovely pictures and create content for her, some of which I might be able to use. But I have no ambitions to be a merchant, let alone invest all the hard work that would turn her into a product that might have the slightest chance to compete with the Victorias of this world. Actually, if Victoria 4 had been around in late 2005, I might have just bought her and never had the experience of 'rolling my own'.

Now, this is where - possibly - you guys come in. I can see myself doing the UV map and finishing the rigging as best I can, then put her up somewhere on the web as one of a million free item. If I'm lucky, maybe people will like her and make additional content for her. But, if some of the talented people on here take a liking to her, then maybe - just maybe - we could work together and make her really awesome.

Anyway, this thread is for critiques, comments, suggestions, offers of collaborations, strategical advice and just plain "Gimme, gimme!!!" shouts.

I'm using a not quite up-to-date version of BagginsBill's upcoming VSS skin shader, by the way. She has no texture except for the eyes and the transmapped lashes and brows.

Ok here goes!

WOW!  :-)

I really like the head/face,  the body looks good also but the face is outstanding, well done on that part.

The body looks pretty natural but needs maybe a bit more definition where the wrist meets the hand.

If you make it available I definitily get the model, for free or cash (im a sucker for unique models).

Regards / Jonny

edit:  The weakest thing about your model is the navel, that really looks strange.  Everything else is anatomically OK, although I think the areolae are bulging kind of a lot - not impossible to find in the real world but imo very unusual.

jonnybode:  Thanks! I'm glad you like her. Good catch, by the way. The wrist are one of the areas I'm not really happy with yet.

I'd also like to see how you modeled the latissimus, where it goes from the back to the arm pit.  It's something that pretty tough to model and I can't think of any Poser character models that really have it done right (no offense to anybody).

The jawline on the head is very good also, better than I've got so far.  Great model!

I think this model looks way better then other newly released 100 000+ polygon characters, you made good use of your 38000 polygons (can one say that?).

Regards / Jonny

pjz99: Wow! Thanks for the in-depth critique. That's really very helpful. I've seen the model you're working on and am looking forward to watching your further progress.

I have to admit I've neglected the navel for a long time. And I'm kind of fond of the bulgy areolae, but I guess it's time to say goodbye to them. I can always bring them back as morphs.

More renders coming up. In the meantime, excuse me while I look up anatomical terms in English. :)

re: the areolae, they're not wrong, they're just unusual.  If you like them, it's your model :)

The wireframe of the back looks good, although you might want to bevel some of the edges in the back of the knee to get a good hard crease there when the knee bends.

edit: now that I think of it, same goes for the inner elbow

jonnybode: I like to think of it as making good use of 9600 polygons. ;) It's too bad really that Poser doesn't support Catmull-Clarke subdivision or I could just import her as is and do any finer details via displacement maps.

One thing I find really awesome about working as low-poly as possible is that once you get the topology just right, changes in shape are really easy. Then again, getting the topology right is a major headache. :D

The navel could maybe use a little work. But great model. Get her some clothes!

pjz99: Good idea with the creases. I'll try that when I get back to working on the joints.

No, I think it definitely makes more sense to give her flat areolae by default and add a morph to make them bulgy, than the other way round.

You won't need a  "Franka Potente" profile morph...;D

richardson: Ha! So you remember that, do you? Even better: when I do make morphs or her, I won't have to worry about ZBrush choking on badly placed poles. :P

dyret: Sadly, I suck at modeling clothes. That's why I'm looking for volunteers. ;)

She is gorgeous! Most impressive :O)

That's it for now with the images, unless there are any special requests. I'll work on the navel and some other details that have been mentioned and post updates when I'm done.

Hi again!

I saw that Phil C's WW2  now has support for the free character "K", Maybe you can ask him if he could support this character too?
Or if maybe the creator of Crossdresser?

That would solve a part of the clothing issue, also Dimension 3D has a program called second skin (not second skin textures) that makes good bases for pants and sweaters.

Unfortunately my own modelling skills are limited.

Regards / Jonny

My clothing modeling skills are very limited, though I could take a crack at it. Just getting the basic shape of the figure is the easy part.

In a pure aesthetics sense, you may want to bring in the waist and the rib cage at the back side a little bit, it's a bit too straight although you can certainly find people shaped like that.

Well I'm impressed. Not only with the great model, excellent job btw, but also with the great critique of her. Gives me hope for when I try.  I'm ready for her when you kick her out of the nest.
8^)

Her natural face is what I want in this. Can you make do a pose so we can see how it looks like when limbs bend?

Utterly beautiful!

She's lovely. :)

Quote - dyret: Sadly, I suck at modeling clothes. That's why I'm looking for volunteers. ;)

Really? I'd think modelling clothes would be a walk in the park for someone who made such a beautiful figure such as Antonia.

I think she looks pretty good.

Looking again at how you have the bodyparts grouped, I am pretty sure this chest/abdomen border is going to give you real problems when bending, due to the stair step line of edges on the border.  IMO you're going to have much smoother bending there if you can manage to have a line of edges follow the border, instead of going across it diagonally like you have now.

Does she have morphs yet?

Are you happy with the rigging? I wonder if you could get phantom3D to collaborate since he is doing neat stuff with rigging. http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2752937&page=1

Nice model. Since you want people to work on it why don't you put it up on a site, setup a version control system and make people submit changes. That way you do not have to individually keep track of everyone doing work on the model.

good luck,

Excellent Work!

I may give it a shot on clothes too. Love the face.

it looks very good to me.  can ya post a close-up of the crotch and inside of mouth,
in case the others are too embarrassed to ask?

Quote - it looks very good to me.  can ya post a close-up of the crotch and inside of mouth,
in case the others are too embarrassed to ask?

:laugh:

...

Awesome model!!!  It is trully amazing what can be done with few polys.  I can't wait to see how she does when posed.  I did have some generic pants, shirt, dress base meshes that I am re-building, and I would try to make some things for her to wear.  -Starkdog 

jonnybode: yep, once she's out and about and I see that she's being used, I'll definitely contact Phil C to see if he's interested. Incidentally, I'll be happy to try my hand at some clothes or convert existing ones. It's just not a priority right now, as there are so many other things to work on.

pjz99: That's actually the border between the collar and the chest you're looking at. She's got a lot of collar because anything that follows the arm movement has to be in the parent of the 'shoulder' (Poser for upper arm). I'm by no means an expert on rigging, but as far as I understand, the shape of the actual border between groups is not so important, as long as one gets the angles and falloff zones right.

PapaBlueMarlin: Nope, no morphs yet. I have to figure out which program to use for those, anyway. If I make them in Wings3D, which would be nice as I'm used to it's interface now, I'll have to come up with a clever way to restore the original vertex numbering because of the way WIngs handles symmetry. That shouldn't be too hard, but that's essentially the reason I haven't done any morphs yet. That script has to be written first.

momodot: Oh, if I could get phantom3D interested in rigging her, that would be phantastic. But he seems to have a lot on his plate at the moment, so I wouldn't dream of asking.

flyerx: Yep, I'll do that as soon as I find a free hosting site that supports Mercurial (or git, if there's no way around it) and allows that kind of content.

Explicit enough?

Just to be save, I clicked all the available advisories.

Hi odf, Antonia's looking great, good job with the topology,  low poly is the most difficult it seems to me, but better in the long run.

Really really nice!

Quote - Here's a quick and dirty contrapost, just to show that she can, to some extend, pose. But as I said, the joint setup is very basic. What's more, certain parts that used to bend nicely don't anymore because I made changes in the geometry and haven't yet adjusted the setup accordingly.

You know I have found that basic straight forward rigging placed properly is usualy the best. I've toyed with all sorts of complicated rigging scemes and have found that the solutions that really worked were all simple basic changes. She looks very good to me so I'd stick with this rigging and make small changes in placement and settings till you're happy. But the shoulders look great to me, and that's quite an accomplishment, shoulders are very hard.

Excellent work! Gimme.

This is a little bit off-topic, but I just have to say you are a master of light and shadow. I know how the VSS shader works (after all, I wrote it) but I'm still dazzled by how good she looks despite having no skin color map.

I wonder if it would be good to make this a "poster child" for a 100% (or nearly 100%) procedural human shader.

I could do a lot more detailed stuff with just a few masks. No need to do a high-res texture. I just need a few control masks for the figure, and then I'd drive all the effects from that.

Lip mask - to color the lips and possibly apply makeup
Oil mask - to produce variation in specular effect, and also to control the application of procedural pores (did that with Apollo) so when you zoom in to the face you see tiny skin details.
Sunshine mask - to produce subtle darkening on surfaces that face the sun for color variation (palms and inside of arms, armpits, inside of thighs, are generally lighter than other areas). This mask would also control production of freckles.

etc.