Last Friday we did not meet with Dr. Wolfe due to bad weather and illness. However, we did meet today and Marie and I showed the progress that we have made.
I have continued working with the Lashes. After initially trying to use an old texture that belonged to Paula, I finally decided to just create my own lashes. I started off trying to make lashes in Adobe Photoshop, however I was unable to get the brushes to create an effect that closely resembles how lashes look. I wanted them to be thick at the base and then taper off at the end. I finally ended up drawing my own lashes with a Sharpie. I started off with printing out a template of the model of the lashes in 3DS Max, and then I placed a blank sheet of paper on top and drew out the lashes so that they would closely match the shape of them.
Here you can see the template and a portion of the hand drawn lashes:
After that, I edited them a bit more in Photoshop, and then I brought them into 3DS Max and applied them to the planes as a texture. It took a bit of tweaking, but I finally arrived at a desirable result.
Here you can see some of the process behind texture mapping. I first had to line up the UV’s so that the texture would apply nicely. From there, I had to fit the texture on as closely as possible.
Below you can see how they currently look:
And here are some before and after views of the lashes on Paula:
The next concern is how the lashes appear when far away from Paula:
As you can see, the lashes I have made do not stand out very well when zoomed out. The next step is to create a thicker pair of lashes. I may either take the kind I have and adjust their thickness in Photoshop, or I may have to draw another pair, perhaps using a thicker Sharpie/Marker.
From there, I will parent them to Paula. I will work on this in the coming weeks. However, Midterms are currently on going and a lot of my attention is focused on that. I will dedicate as much time to this as possible.
aslfthomas 