Lesson #1 in 3D Modeling - Don't Turn Your Wife Into a Cartoon Character

I am being somewhat facetious when I say that, but, this last week I decided to take what I learned in modeling characters in Poser and start making my family as avatars to join me in Poser. While I didn't have too much problem with making me, I also wasn't very concerned about what it would look like. Some hair, a beard, brown eyes and it would look somewhat like me. So, I decided to make Nancy.

I started by looking at some pictures of her when she was younger, so, just like me she would be younger in Poser than we are in real life. I tweaked all the face settings and changed things all around tried for hours to get it close to right. No luck. Part of the problem is that I was being way more concerned about what she would look like and trying to get her to come out like the pictures than I had been looking at.

Then I thought wait there is no way good for this come out. I don't want Nancy to say "Is that what you think I look like?" or something like that. So, I decided to come clean with her and tell her what I was doing and how hard it was. She had some good advice that I have decided to follow which was:

"Don't make me a cartoon character".

So, Nancy will not be journeying with me into the Virtual World. Though my kids may not be so lucky. Afterwards I got on the forums and looked to see if anyone had any advice for doing realistic characters. The general consensus on the forums is that human beings are very aware of what people look like and that is why it is so hard to make characters that look like an actual person. It is fairly easy to make a character that looks realistic and even photo-realistic, but, next to impossible to make them look like someone exactly. So, I didn't feel too bad about my lack of ability, it seems everyone is pretty much in the same boat except the truly talented.

As part of this experimenting I did learn a lot about making dynamic hair in Poser. I created a skull cap which fit on the character's head and then divided this skull cap into separate areas called groups. I created groups after I had tried just growing and styling the hair over the entire head which didn't turn out well at all. I created groups for on both the left and right hand side of the skull cap for the top, mid, outer, outer2, temple, mid back and lower back. Then I grew hair and moved the hair down or to the side.

Though this is not perfect, it provides a way to grow and style hair in Poser. With enough time and patience (which I currently don't have), I am sure you could create some realistic looking hair styles. Kate was over and looked at what I was doing and gave me some advice about how real styling of hair is done in much the same way I was doing it, by cutting and styling in sections. We'll see if I have enough patience this week to try something with it.