I'm on vacation this week! Vacation to work, I mean.
I finally installed Ubuntu 10.10. I hadn't used Linux in a long time, but Ubuntu is a really mature and user-friendly operating system, and it was easy to adapt. The installation was a lot easier than any other Linux distribution I used before. I used Dropbox to keep my files around, so I was able to quickly install Blender 3D and GIMP and get to work!
Blender runs a lot better now (I have an onboard intel graphics card, so it's pretty impressive that blender is able to run, given the fact that it uses opengl a lot.) and renders have become a bit faster too!
I worked on the hair, a lot. I used only one texture, and some noise maps to make the hair look more volumetric. Here's an early test of the hair:
Here's a beauty render of the character, and an in-editor screenshot. You can see that the hair is formed by alpha planes. This is to help keep the load off the renderer, since I need it to make fast preview renders to test the animation as I go.
There are about 5 lights casting raytraced shadows, but still the render took 9 seconds.
The character has a little skin texture (intentionally made not clearly visible) and doesn't have eyebrows or eyelashes yet...
After the eyebrows, eyelashes and finishing touches, I'm going to create an animation rig. This set of objects will help me animate the model, but it's a hard task to create and set them all up. Stay tuned!
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