*bopperthijs, JOELGLAINE:  Everyone is beautiful, and deserves to be special to someone.

*I was just kidding, I've been married for almost 25 years with a lovely wife, but I gained about 20 pounds, the last three years. Perhaps a sign of a good and happy life!
I compaired your beautiful model with a bouddha, and a bouddha is a symbol for good luck and happiness.
We all really need that these days.

best regards,

Booper.

Quote - *bopperthijs, JOELGLAINE:  Everyone is beautiful, and deserves to be special to someone.

*I was just kidding, I've been married for almost 25 years with a lovely wife, but I gained about 20 pounds, the last three years. Perhaps a sign of a good and happy life!

Well, alright then.  I have two sisters that are single right now, and I was about to do some match making. But since your married, I'll let ya be.  :wub: :lol:

What do they look like? LOLOL :laugh: I'm 50, fat, had two strokes, and don't have a job, do have diabetes, and am confused all the time.

Sounds like I'd be a better politician than date.:lol: I've been alone so long, I don't even care if I hook up any more.

Well, the two (I have 5 sisters) I'm speaking of, one is 70 something, the other is 49 and blond. But i really wouldn't dare actually try to set them up with anyone. OH MY! These two would definitely beat me sensless and castigate me for the rest of my life! Famous Irish temper, you see.
The older sister is the true artist in the family she actually made a living at it. Constantly haring off to somewhere in the world, a mind of her own and never stays put. Last time I heard she was in Bolivia, who knows why.
The younger sis is an RN and lives in Washington she's about 5'1" and a fiery little wildcat.

If she's a red-head....

ANYWAY..Washington state is the other side of the continent from Tennessee, so I'll pass on long trips.

The fall from short trips hurt enough.:laugh:

No brothers available??

Darn it...

But let me add to the chorus that this whole line of character meshes looks amazing. I really love that re-rig you have going on.

Hi Sean, I have four brothers all blond haired and blue eyed ( I'm the only kid in the bunch that had dark hair hmmm........:ohmy:)

Thanks, I think I have finally found a mesh that I'm sastisfied with. Check your SM I'm sending you a message.

I like him.  He will definately need a nice suit....kinda overfed (read sucessful) mafia dude thing. 

--Rebekah--

 well at least you won't need to worry about genitals for him.
Love esther

Now, Esther!  Even if he can't do anything with them, doesn't mean they should be just left off. I guess the M3 gens could be used, if needed. LOLOL:laugh: No M4 gens, though. Having to pay for a penis is just WAY to perverse for any of us. I think. :lol:

Oh yes! A gangsta suit would be perfect.

Gens will be a geometry switch, just in case he might need them.

I almost have both models UVed and rigged.  Brad regular and Fat Brad.  I Kept the border, nipples, eyes, nose, mouth and belly button locked into the same position on both UV maps.  So the two of them should be able to trade textures.

Will upload some more pics, tommorrow.

Cheers,

Mike.

Quote -

Hi RorrKonn, where ya been? Doing well I hope.

I am trying to learn to code 3D ,2D ,ah C++ ,openGL ,DirectX.

Hopefuly in a few years I will have some app's of use.

 i just meant it's hard to actually locate them in someone with that body habitus

LOLOL:laugh:

How's this for the regular Brad, using the same 11K mesh.  Might get a little more detail, but not much. 11K only goes so far :)

Front

That is what displacement maps are for. The fine details are begging for that kind of stuff. Trekkiegrrrl did some displacement maps for M3 of veins and tendons for muscle men in her free-stuff.  You might want to check them out.

On other news...I made the STAFF PICKS this week! Yaaaaaaay! www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

Congrats Joel. Cool read.  Makes you want to write another yes?  I got something from the staff once, a removal and a warning.  LOL.

Your mesh is killer, deserves rigs worthy of your mesh.

Microsoft has VSC++EE with Herbert Schildt biginner's guide .pdf all Free.

If I can learn this stuff anyone can.I am a idiot.

It's like 3D ya just keep at it till one day ya get it.

I swear when I got my fist 3D app trueSpace 3.

I could not read the manuel.

If I can learn to read & write English witch to this day still seems broken to me.

Leaning to code alt to be easy after learning English.

All I know for sure is untill I learn to code.

The doors stay closed.

I'm writing like a tornado. Check out my gallery! Lordy, I think I'm writing another Dune sized novel with more nudity, plot-twists and drama. LOLOL

BTW--Mike!  You finished with Brad's head yet? I might try some morphs this weekend if so.

Hey Mike, Looking great!
 
 Something about the upper arm, seems a tad off  - too short compared to the forearm or is it the back muscles [dorsals] that come out too wide?   Perhaps they are overly developed compared to the rest of the body?   The dorsals could be a tad too highly  and forwardly placed  too  thus not allowing  it to form the edge that hollows the arm pit. It would be good to see the arms  raised more to see the armpits.

That area is the only trouble spots I see in forming.  I suppose shoulder blades would be really hard  to model in the confines of so few polys especially since they change positions and shapes with arm movement so much.

The rest seems just superb to me, so glad you are so close to finishing it.  With your excellent rigging this would be a very special figure  I wold love to have.:)

Cheers to you  :)

Mike, that's a great sculpt. I agree that the arms might need some more work, though. Also the feet.

Have I ever told you about subdivisionmodeling.com? It's a great site for reading up on how to model and also to get feedback on your models.

RorrKonn:  That's alot to learn but you're right it just takes time and determination.  I still want to learn C++ and Visual Basic. These days I really have to concentrate to learn anything, so it'll have to be a future project.

Joel, shortly I will send you the OBJ. Not positive it's ready yet.  I still need to work on the eyes.  The geometry is there I just need to sculpt them better.

Masha:  Yes you're right the back arm is much too short.  I moved the lats in a bit and it's better but still not right.  I will have to dig my photo's out and work from them to get it right.  For the shoulder blades, I may just add another 1000 poly's and pick out a few more details.  But I have to be carefull not to go overboard like last time.

odf:  No I have never heard of that site, thanks I will check it out.  Yes the feet and hands need plenty of work yet. I always leave them till last cause I don't like them.

Here's the same mesh at 44K you can see all the detail I have in it alot better.

Front:

Back.

phantom3d - I love the look of this figure in your last two pics (the 44k version). The muscle groups look great and I've been a quiet admirer of the bends you manage to achieve for a while now.

I can't help but think that the entire torso (including hips) is too wide though. Not that there arn't guys out there with pretty much exactly these proportions, but he just seems a little stocky for a generic figure type. Have you tried superimposing him over a photo reference for comparison? You might find that reducing his width from the top of the armpits down to the top of the thighs might suddenly improve the upperarm length issue. Just a thought.

I guess it all depends on what the intension is for the figure - whether he's designed to function like other base figures with a complete selection of body and face morphs to facilitate diversity in his appearance, or if he's intended to be just Brad as is. Having seen fat Brad I'm kind of guessing you're using different rigs for different body shapes. I kind of like the all-in-one concept for figures but I know this can be restrictive.
Do you have lots of scaling options for bodyparts built into your design? I love Apollo for this; V4 and M4 don't have enough scaling.

Either his forearms look to long or his upper arms look to short,IMO. When the arm is folded at the elbow, the wrist is even to the arm-pit.

At least on me.:laugh: I might be a mutant.

The forearms appear somewhat atrophied.  Moving the elbow out where it belongs and just foreshortening the existing width may help.

Joel - Yes ... you are one of us.
                             - The Mutants

carodan! thank you so very much, I have been asking this question many times over the past months.  I have two machines.  On my work machine (the one I actually do the modelling on) I am using a 40" wide screen plasma T.V. and on that monitor the model looks like the thinner less wide one that you are showing.  But on my Dell monitor it looks like this one I posted too wide to my eye as well. This answers my question, he IS too wide, and the monitor DOES make a difference.  I will adjust accordingly.  

That still leaves the arm proportions to clean up.  I will work it out today, along with some more detail in the low poly version. 

EDIT:  Yes there will be full scaling.

I used to have similar issues with selecting the correct monitor resolution. Now I make a square image in photoshop and physically measure it on the monitor to be sure - I know pretty serious professional graphic designers who have been caught out that way.

P.S. I'm assuming since you modelled on the monitor that makes him look thinner that the model probably is too wide, unless you've been adjusting your image posts to compensate (?)

No I havn't been adjusting the pics, so the model really is too wide. Pretty easy to fix though, but first I want to get my work monitor adjusted so that it matches the dell monitor. This resolution thing has been nagging me for months now. 

I'm thinking for photo's to use for proportions, Lumir from 3dsk has nice body proportions.  I would like Brad to be a little beefier, but for joint and body proportions  this guy is very good (normal to my eye.)

Yep, he looks fairly average to my eyes. References are such a good thing. I assume you'll be able to get some front and side elevations in various classic poses (standing and sitting)? The eye can so easily deceive - measure, measure, measure (as a painter I'm forever having to double-check my references).  An incorrectly scaled head or hands can throw things out dramatically. For example, I can't be the only person to have noticed that either M4's head is too small or his hands are massive (possibly both (among other things - I haven't studied him enough). I'd measure in a number of different ways for each body part.
One thing I've noticed a few times with various 3d figures is that body proportions can seem to change based on the pose (i.e. the bending seems to distort a body part or happen around an incorrect pivot such that it looks wrong in the resulting pose). Just thought I'd mention this in case you hadn't considered it.
The type of camera you use in your 3d app can also be problematic. I suspect this is particularly true of Poser. Depending on the camera position and perspective settings, a figure can easily look totally out of proportion whilst in other shots fine. Worth considering when test rendering. I'd tend to measure body parts using orthographic views, and be very careful where you're measuring from and to (not always easy when a body part is bent or obscured).

P.S. The image you just posted is perfectly square on my monitor.

I've run into that, on my last render. I thought I was losing my mind when a small figure seemed to be a giant due to placement, and the focal length of the camera in Poser. It's annoying to say the least. I don't use M4 because of the weird proportions. Same with V4.

With alien figures, it's fine, but pure humans....it's problematic.  The Brad figure is a case in point of looking at it, until the flaws disappear.

Mike--I though you were going for the 'thicker' bodied among us, so I didn't notice anything amiss. I'm not really fat, but I have a wide body like the BASIC Brad, not the FAT Brad!  NO muscle definition to speak of (That's another discussion!).  As such, I didn't see anything wrong with him other than the arms.  For that, I do apologize. I should have more Empirical eyes from being an artist and having trained eyes, but I was blinded by my own body.

I have to stop looking at it before I go blind!:laugh: Or something like that!:lol:

So I readjusted the width of the figure based on that. I think it has also solved much of the arm problem.  I am now going to overlay some photos to the figure and adjust some more by that.

Here's what I have so far. These shots should be square on your monitors they are 500X500 each.

No problem Joel, I have known it was off for awhile but didn't fix it.

I have many photo's from 3dsk so no excuse just lazy. 

I'm going to go back on something I just said about using orthographic views. If you have good reference photos that you're going to use as comparison overlays for measuring, it's probably better to try and match the camera views of those pictures. I'm most likely getting anal here but it will make a difference.
If you're going from other sources like  anatomical measurement charts, the orthographic method is the way I'd go.

If I had the skills to model I'm afraid I would be totally anal about all this and most likely work to RW units inside the 3d app and possibly even make measuring objects (although you probably have accessible ruler tools - 3dsMax used to last time I used it back at version 5).

It is worthwhile if you have time along the way to try some overlays of different photographic models, with varying body types etc. There's an unbelievable amount of variation in real people (why scaling is so important IMO). The way different people habitually hold themselves introduces a whole other level of percieved variation - although I guess this is posing and not modelling.
Observation and comparison - useful tools in any creative process.

No worries,mate.  I was just letting you know the 2 cents I put into my observations were only worth one cent on this particular project,IMO.  Overlays are a good thing if you stick true to the model.

I was always a terrible observer until an art school teacher made me do loads of drawings where I wasn't allowed to look at the paper, only at the life model. Although the drawings would usually come out as a scrambled mess of lines, the individual lines were truer to what was in front of me than what I was doing before. From there it was just a matter of looking at the paper again, but with a redressed balance of observing the subject.

Nowadays I've slipped back into bad habits of invention again. I find 3d a lot harder than painting - so many angles from which everything has to work. Computer monitors are also ruining my eyes.

I have tons of photo's from 3dsk everything they ever put out from the start till now.  So I will be able to use several different people.

I even measured myself on the wall with all the different positions of joints and body features (belly button, nipples etc) and converted them to fractions and decimals to use in measurements. So I have all these marks and notations scribbled on my wall next to my computer.  LOL.

Joel: I do intend to stay true to the figure.  Mostly I want the overlays for positioning joints and body features. For the shape and style of the figure, that will be my own, from my mind.

Well...ALL art made by any artist , contains part of the artist.. THAT is one of the reasons that Poser and other 3D CGI applications get slammed by traditional  Artists as having no soul, or not being 'real art'.

As such, the figures that do best have less of the usual 'dead doll look' and more personality. Being universal is all well and good, but looking like some one you REALLY want to know is important,too. Anton's Apollo has that 

It's a slippery thing to breathe life into the unliving, but that is what you're trying. Humans are the biggest critics of all things human, because we ARE humans. We know what 'looks right' even if we can't articulated it well.  Follow your ideal and idead and I think you're going to do alright..

Brad is really starting to evolve, now.

I might not be able to morph anything in the upcoming month. I have to move again on May 14. The powers that be decided to upgrade the building, starting with my floor. SO I'm screwed in doing anything useful. I don't have a clue where I'm moving, because THEY don't know!  SO I'm stressed out. I just UNPACKED! Dammit.

What ,huh , ah who needs there so called soul when ya got CGI ;)

Hi Joel, RorrKonn:)

Just woke up, so lazy today, didn't want to get out of bed.

Sorry to hear of your troubles Joel.  They are finding you a place to live though?

They say they will. Supposedly in the same building, but some of us may get evicted. Everyone in the whole building is about to riot. It's a government FUBAR of epic proportions.  I'm so stressed out, I can bearly think. The police got called out twice yesterday because people  where so pissed off.

So much bull-crap for so little modifications. They are putting in new sinks and air-conditioners .  They have to relocate the whole freaking building's occupants to do that? Good god.

I can fix the sink , heat & air .Will someone fix the Gov.

Blender ,Gimp ,Dev-C++ All Free.

Make & sell ya some 3D conent buy ya self a house.

Code a app where the humans bend like humans buy ya self a country.

:laugh:  That's where me brain done deserted me. Damn thing.  When I need it the most, no less!  Like a rat on a sinking ship!:lol: