Sketch Club - Sweet, little old lady

Each week I go with some friends to Sketch Club where we spend our lunch our sketching the denizens of Culver City.  This week a sweet, little old lady was waiting to cross the street.  She was chosen as our "mark".  We can look, but we can't draw her until we get back to our desks.

This week I have some spare time, so I sculpted, painted and rendered my version.

The usual, ZBrush for sculpting and painting, Maya and Mental Ray for rendering and slight tweaks in Photoshop.

Bubba

Sculpt was done in one or two hours, then I spent the better part of a day fixing the hair and rendering.

The hair was too thin, so after hours messing with it, I ended up exporting 27k curves and writing a quick scriptlet to extrude a ribbon on each curve.

The data was so heavy that everything crawled and the smallest tweaks took a long time to process.  Guess I found the limit of my home rig.

Sculpt in ZBrush and render in Maya using Mental Ray.

How I write a MEL script - Example Script

We are ready to write the actual script.  Using the template, we add inputs, error check and do the work.  You can download the MEL script and view it while I break it down section by section.

Reminder: We are making a script that will create a matte render suitable for use in Photoshop.  As an extra, I've modified the code so we can also make RGB mattes.

Captain Underpants

Remorse

My son spends most of his free time composing music.  Bear in mind that he's 14 and could be spending his days as I did watching cartoons.  Sure, he does his fair share of texting, but the kid logs serious hours composing.