Sorry, but I just feel incredibly fantastic after completing the avatar that I've been trying to make for over 2 months now I think! 0_0 I wasted so much time on it solely and I paid the price for it with falling behind with the project itself and having to sacrifice Japanese revision and life drawing as a result. Last week Monday or maybe slightly earlier, I had a sudden revelation of sorts, I suddenly figured out how to build the head for the avatar. On Tuesday when I went in for a seminar instead of going to the one on Thursday (I went to another groups seminar due to complications on Thursday), and I ran into a good friend of mine who knew how to build the avatar which was a brilliant stroke of luck.
I showed him the head I had built seperately and the body as well, and asked him how to join them together. After some tinkering around, he managed to join the two parts together and form the avatar's whole body :). Trouble is though, I still had no idea had to do clothes and hair, so I went home after the seminar to attempt it anyways. I struggled like hell to figure out to make the clothes, I tried some methods but it always went wronf and I barely could find tutorials on adding clothes on the Internet, hence it was very frustrating for me. But I had another relevation later in the week and I realised, what would happen if I tried to model the clothes on the body seperately using the same method I used for the head?
Basically, I built a plane in Front view for the coat in front of the chest, and I applied the Symmetry modifier to it and then used the Extrude Face option combined with the Shift key to create new polygons from that single plane-cum-polygon now. I created a box around the chest, basically imagien people who wear cardboard boxes with their arms, head and legs sticking out thats what literally recreated. I then made the box transparent and edited the vertices of it with MeshSmooth active on it to help me mold the box into the shape of a coat on the body, and it worked out really well! :D
After that recent success, I immediately applied the same method to build face mask, eyepatch, trousers and shoes and what you will see soon is a result of my discovery :). It took me freaking ages to mold the vertices of the coat alone just right, but it paid off in the end. After modelling all the clothes on, the next step would be to texture them. Handily, since I made them as seperate components to the body, they will end up using their own invidual materials and hence each component can hsve a different material assigned to it. I used the UVW Unrwap modifier to create texture maps of each component one at a time, then I exported them as image files, where I thus edited them with The GIMP (yes that is its actual name). I went a little crazy with the coat, and I changed the look of it by adding red dragons to the front, some blue lines and butterflies (I brush I downloaded for the butterflies) on the back of the coat and I also used a Japanese character brush to put my name in Hiragana on the coat, but it ended up on the inside (dont ask how -_-').
Finally, the hair was left and this turned out to be the biggest demon to conquer. As it stands, Im not really as happy with the hair, but 3DS MAX does create some truly awesome and realistic hair. I had no idea how to do the hair, and I tried following the tutorials but only the official ones were of any help to me. I was meant to model the hair using splines so I could create my ideal hairstyle, but it was very fiddly, difficult, time consuming and frustrating to work with, hence why I didnt use it in the end. Instead, I used preset hair and I tweaked the hairstyle of it using the Styling options as well as recolouring it too. It still looks pretty damn good, but it's not the hairstyle I wanted ideally. Hair in 3DS Max is probably the most difficult thing in bar human and animal animation possibly, and the hair you will see is what I managed to get after hundreds of failed attempts and retries due to limitations and how unforgiving the Hair system is.
Anyways, no moee further delays, here is the avatar! I'm still trying to figure out how to get it from 3ds max into flash, but Ive just asked a friend on it anyways:
The avatar has turned pretty awesome in my opinion, I created a hybrid of my two imvu characters, but it's nowhere near as detailed and refined as my ideal avatar, although for my first attempt its not too damn bad! ;D. I am going to create my ideal avatar one day definitely, its going to be one of my ultimate challenges, I was too ambitious witht the concepts for the box, elements and avatar, but Ive always been better at concept than technical skills anyways :P. if you could leave me any comments on here, Facebook or in person or w/e, Id be very pleased :). Ciao!
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