Ethin's Melody and Micah Dev Lab

Ethin

Like the title says, stuff I'm making with and for @Lady Littlefox's wonderful Melody and Micah.

 

Some of it may even end up as freebies or products, like these. VVV

Better Fur Bump Maps For Melody & Micah

Fancy Cats - Tuxedo For Melody & Micah

Ethin

Let's start with some actual art.

 

Ethin

Was testing out a transparency map that can be used with a layered shader, LIE, or geo shell to make Melody and Micah into hybrids. I made the map for the Egyptian characters above.

Ethin

Been learning some Blender recently, so was getting practice sculpting morphs and play with Melody.

Ethin

Seeing as how my first character set was cats, decided to try my had at a dog (Beagle).

I think texturing goes better if I do the character morph first. None of Melody's ear morphs really worked so I made one of my own along with morphs to lower the sides of the upper lip and pull the corners of the mouth back farther. I'll try making some similar morphs (fingers crossed) for Micah. Also I don't know how too make injection files for distribution of custom morphs, so there's that.

Testing to see if the bones in Melody's ears would work for posing my custom morphed ears. Basic movement, yes. Flappy doggy Dumbo airplane wings, nope.

Ethin

First pass on the texture, not bad, still needs some work. Maybe a variant or two.

Redfern

I'll definitely keep an eye on this thread!

So your dog can not be achieved with the existing dials in the "Furries for..." set?  Your custom morphs really sell the notion she is a beagle!

Ethin

Redfern said:

I'll definitely keep an eye on this thread!

So your dog can not be achieved with the existing dials in the "Furries for..." set?  Your custom morphs really sell the notion she is a beagle!

Unfortunately not. The 2 mouth morphs are a nice touch but the ear morph is a must. After an hour of working with the available ear morphs the result was far from what I wanted and far from the sides of her head. 

I could always just manually re-write a per-existing injection file, done that before, but I don't know if that would be ethically agreeable or not. 

 

With some tweaks she could be several breeds.

Ethin

Nothing special, just copied the settings over to Micah. Surprisingly my custom morphs as well, no need to re-sculpt them!

Sven Dullah

Hi there! I don't see any pictures, except for a few in your opening post, just wanted you to know:) And I'd love to check out your stuff. Maybe it's on my side? I use an old version of FF.

Ethin

I use Firefox too, no problems here. The images are coming from two different sources, most of the finished art is coming from renderosity, the rest are hosted on postimages.org.

Sounds like the later are the ones your having trouble with.

Sven Dullah

Ok tks, I'll check again later when on my main machine.

Ethin

Any better? I moved them over to daz.

Sven Dullah

Yup I see them now! Thank you!

Sven Dullah

Haha this is really cool, well done:)

Ethin

Testing a couple of ear length options.

Ethin

Took a break from learning the arcane arts (Poser content creation in DAZ Studio).

DollyGirl

Such a sweetie, Ethin

Ethin

DollyGirl said:

Such a sweetie, Ethin

Thanks!

Ethin

Lol, without the flopped ears she looks a bit like a Corgi.

 

Mostly brown variant.

Ethin

Ethin said:

 "Do you see what I see, said the cheetah girl to the savannah wind"  lol

I'll bet no-one ever zoomed in far enough to.

Redfern

Ethin said:

Took a break from learning the arcane arts (Poser content creation in DAZ Studio).

Dare I say it?  She's a cute lil' stinker!

Ethin

Redfern said:

Dare I say it?  She's a cute lil' stinker!

Bet her mother called her that all the time when she was little.

Ethin

Darker variant.

DollyGirl

She is turning out to be a lovely model Ethin.

Ethin

DollyGirl said:

She is turning out to be a lovely model Ethin.

Thanks!

Ethin

Floof test. Kinda works but not really, doesn't look like its a part of her. "sigh" I guess the next thing to try is strand based hair.

Redfern

Ethin said:

Floof test. Kinda works but not really, doesn't look like its a part of her. "sigh" I guess the next thing to try is strand based hair.

I might have to debate you about that because I think it looks great!

What items did you use yo achieve the effect, that is, for the collar, the tail and the scalp hair?  And did you do anything unique for the body and face?  That looks more robust than simply texture and bump maps.  I feel you've truly elevated Melody to a whole new level!

Ethin

Thanks!

It was just a quick proof of concept I through together from various old scenes, I really didn't think it was that kind of special. It might have taken longer to render than to setup.

Well, for the tail and collar I used Littledragon's Bushy Tail 2, and the hair is Pandora Hair. I don't know what to tell you about the body and head 'cause there the same shader settings I've been using for almost a year now, must just be the lighting and camera angle?.

 

But I guess I should say I still want to try some stuff with this ^ setup 'cause I'd really rather not use DS's strand hair. Its still pretty basic and it would seem that I'd have to start from scratch for each new character. But I wasn't thinking of a full blown coat, just some fluff around the neck and chest and have some short sparse stuff on the rest of the body to back up the settings I already have. No idea how that would really look.

 

Oh ya, I blame this regal puff pice i saw on pinterest.

 

 

Ethin

Eye textures for the Beagle pack.

 

Ethin

Well I finally forced myself to try and do the inj files, after an hour I had them... and they didn't work!!?

Two hours later, after reading a bunch of useless stuff on the subject, I just opened up someone else's inj file and compared it to mine, made some changes, and now they do work!

So, that was a thing.

Now to see if I still remember how to do mat files.