For those following this blog you know that besides the yearly post to keep it alive, my other frequent activity is to revise the comic(s) I feature here any time there is a technological breakthrough with the modeling software.
I also wait a long darn time for those technological breakthroughs. Right now, I’ve been waiting over a year for the promised skin enhancements (scars, makeup, stubble, tattoos, etc.), for the previously released 4k upgrades to base skins used on the models.
For those going “blah blah blah, what is he talking about?” Reallusion, the makers of the iClone and Character Creator software, upgraded the skin textures for characters to 4k resolutions. They left out the ability to edit those skins with makeup etc. and worse yet, took out that ability for the 1k characters.
When the 4k skins were announced, I decided to redo the models for my comic based on the promise that the skin editor would be out soon. Alas, instead giving the usuers the promised editor, they made one more sneaky enhancement to the skins — 4k digital humans with head shot technology.
The reason I chose iClone as my primary software for the comic back in the day was its built in ability to take a facial picture of someone you knew and make that into a low resolution character to use in the program. All the early comics (if I ever put them back up), feature friends and celebrity analogs using that feature.
They removed the feature at the early part of the 2010s and shuffled it around to other programs, making it worse each time they touched it. I’ve revised my characters a few times now without it, and now that it’s back… I’m not going to use it. It has the same problem as the old version did: The body and back of the heads look great, the center of the face (where they cut and pasted the texture) looks like someone cut and pasted it and really stands out. While passable for background characters (even at 4k), I wouldn’t use them for featured characters.
But all is not lost! The head shot module came with new sliders and new abilities to model characters. The digital human skins that came with it can be used to upgrade my old 4k characters to more life like skins and give an urgent need to redo the few remaining 1k characters (like it or not), to new versions of the characters that start in 4k.
I made a new model Solita last night.
As you can see, the new model is missing the eye liner, blush, lipstick, etc., that the 1k model. Those are coming back soon (allegedly). That said, the 4k model is almost lifelike.
It took roughly an hour to produce the new model and strangely enough, when I started from scratch, the old and new models were almost perfectly aligned in height and body features. While I won’t be able to use shots of the old model when I redo the first issue of RETRO RETRO RETRO (again), the models scared me in their similarity.
I have about 30 characters to redo now and then we’ll be… you’ve heard it before. One of these days, one of these days… issues galore!
With that, have a merry whatever and a new year.
Jim