WIP Character Sculpt

WIP of a sculpt based on a 2D work by Jennifer Park:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/mqRXbE

Working on proportions and starting the hair blocking.

Used Marvelous Creator for the first time to create the waist sash. Took a bit to get a knot working effectively including a lot of reloading of saves when the physics broke. 

Painted skin, lips and makeup in Substance Painter. Adjusted roughness of some areas so they pick up highlights more, similar as reference image. 

Used Character Creator 4 to start posing the character. Will need some more practice with the software to get better results. Would love to be able to use the hair features and the cloth physics. 

Matched pose. Character feels a bit stiff as no facial rigging. Would like to improve it further. Face blend shapes next maybe, or just some further adjustments to pose. The body rig was from Character Creator 4, and whilst it was technically quicker, I ended up needing to fix a lot of areas I wouldn't normally need to if I had just rigged and skinned it in Maya. Overall reasonably happy with this finishing point, for now!

Tried to give the face textures a more painterly feel in substance and bring the size of the eyes to be closer to the reference ^

Used and adjusted a leather smart material in Substance for the corset. 

Added detail to the hair via mostly lines across a normal map in Substance. 

Starting the rigging process. Starting with the body and will add in the hair and clothes. Skinning and making sure there is a smooth transition for each joint. Will endeavour to add facial blend shapes so the face can be animated as well. 

Tried to hand paint weights for the clothing to have it not overlap the body at first, then realized I could utilise copying the skin weights to the various clothing pieces by selecting the vertices that needed to be sourced around the clothes. This process was so satisfying after spending far too long doing a manual tedious way. 

Now creating the rig, starting with the IK/FK arms. 

IK and FK switches are complete for Arms and Legs, including Heel Pivot, Toe Pivot, Ball Pivot etc for the feet. 

Had some issues with joints twisting. Identified that ensuring the joints were relatively straight usually helps with this, so I replaced the skinned joints with new joints, added the new influences and it worked better from there. 

clavicle, neck IK, spine IK all done, time now to work on the face then get the clothes back on. 

Squash and stretch was difficult to get working, and I found that the issue was a little setting called 'Segment Scale Compensate' was turned off the joints which was causing the issue. All fixed now!