odf opened this issue on Oct 27, 2008 ยท 13933 posts
MikeJ posted Tue, 06 October 2009 at 3:10 AM
Looking good, BlueEcho, and I'm really glad to hear you like working with the UVs!
Looking at Blue Echo's texture up there reminds me of something I wanted to bring up a few times before but kept forgetting.
Is there anything that can be done about the eyebrows?
I'm not a fan of the idea of a mesh for eyebrows. It irritated the hell outta me when they did that for Victoria, and I went way out of my way to remove it. I mean, I didn't just make a morph, I learned how to edit it out of the OBJ file period. Seeya later, bye.
For one thing, Poser doesn't allow for making a material not cast shadows, and in close ups, an eyebrow trans map will cast shadows on the head. That, of course, just looks all wrong.
For another thing, considering it's still just a texture that's being used, I don't think there's anything to gain over texturing it directly onto the forehead, and as I mention above, at least one good reason not to have a separate mesh.
Now this is not a comment on what BlueEcho above has done, or anybody else, either. It's just the nature of the beast - the eyebrows look like even less of a part of the figure when mapped to a separate geometry floating above the forehead.
We all know that doing CG is finding ways to fake everything. Sometimes with textures, sometimes with geometry, but it's all still an illusion. IMO though, the eyebrows as a separate mesh used with a trans map is a bad fake, and eyebrows painted or applied directly to the forehead look far better. And of course won't ever give that weird shadow or floating-off-the-head effect.
Just wondering what everybody else thinks. :-)