Maggie Chow ...W.I.P

Post by **Jonas** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 3:48 pm

Oh yeah, THAT kind of masking. Sorry, brain fart on my part. You still haven't eased my fears though, I suspect it may end up looking quite terrible. We'll see!

fox · Post by **fox** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 7:57 pm

Hey Alex, it's great that you continue the work on the characters. In case of Maggie I have to say though that I don't like her new hair at all. I think the original looks quite conservative and stern, pretty much like a principal. And even when I put that argument aside I don't like the lose hair at all. They just don't look like natural hair. Also I second that the upper lip is a bit too big.

Anyways, thank you for spending your time working on it.

justanotherfan · Post by **justanotherfan** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 8:30 pm

I want to say that the hair is a style. For me, and for fox it seems, it really isn't our style. It's so not my style that I still laugh. On the other hand, it looks like an avant-garde fashionable kinda thing, and Maggie is an actress and a pop-culture icon in her time (everyone knows her in HK, celebrity gossip etc.).

For another such figure with similar crazy hair, here's an uncharacteristic photo of Utada Hikaru of Japan and America-

I don't know much about the transparency, but I've broken the renderer before where everything translucent showed up pink. I hope that can work somehow. I was thinking before of an in-game shot, or just a shot of her in front of a more complex background, to make the hair less visible and unnatural than it is on a solid gray background. Each line is visible now, but it would blend better into a background.

Lappi · Post by **Lappi** » Sun Apr 20, 2008 12:18 am

$\:D/$ $\:D/$ $\:D/$ Well, I think it's quite nice, or something, but i'm to drunk to tell...also i have a lot of blackouted memory slots i've no idea of what has been going on tonight...i guess i shouldn't have posted that here, but i just wanted to say that i think it's awesome that someone has been working on one of my all-time favorite villains and i hope it will work out in the end, also i hope i won't be banned for this utterly useless drunken comment which serves no real purpose...

Post by **Jonas** » Sun Apr 20, 2008 12:30 am

Yet another piece of empirical data to support Shane's theory about drunkenness and the Internet.

_Alex_ · Post by **_Alex_** » Sun Apr 20, 2008 1:07 am

Jonas wrote:Yet another piece of empirical data to support Shane's theory about drunkenness and the Internet.

Depends how tactful you are. I may or may not have been drunk all through developing maggie, and in every post i made in this thread >_>

I WASNT, but i *could* have been. you see..... this guy just got it wrong. You never announce that you're intoxicated.

it spoils the fun.

Post by **Jonas** » Sun Apr 20, 2008 1:16 am

That was in fact the theory, however. That if you are drunk and you use the Internet, you will announce your drunkenness. You just can't help it.

So far we've collected a lot of data to support the theory.

_Alex_ · Post by **_Alex_** » Sun Apr 20, 2008 1:24 am

Jonas wrote:That was in fact the theory, however. That if you are drunk and you use the Internet, you will announce your drunkenness. You just can't help it.

So far we've collected a lot of data to support the theory.

I'm gonna launch a counter-active data collection mission

Post by **DDL** » Sun Apr 20, 2008 2:52 am

I post just as badly when drunk as I do when sober.

I like to think this is endearing, but I suspect it's not. Ah well.

Post by **metche_steele** » Sun Apr 20, 2008 1:22 pm

DDL! There you are

What's your take on transparency for the hair and how well do you think it will translate in game?

Post by **DDL** » Sun Apr 20, 2008 1:42 pm

I suspect it would have to be masked, not translucent.

Masking would look ok(ish) as long as the texture size is fairly huge so you don't see the sharp joins.

The problem with DX translucency is it's based on strict RGB values, with full white being 100% visible, and full black being 0% visible.

So translucent black hair would be...invisible.

Ideally, we'd be able to do it via a modulated texture setting (where grey (128,128,128) is invisible and everything either side is increasingly visible), but I don't think we can do those, annoyingly.

Taskeen · Post by **Taskeen** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 1:20 am

justanotherfan wrote:I want to say that the hair is a style. For me, and for fox it seems, it really isn't our style. It's so not my style that I still laugh. On the other hand, it looks like an avant-garde fashionable kinda thing, and Maggie is an actress and a pop-culture icon in her time (everyone knows her in HK, celebrity gossip etc.).

For another such figure with similar crazy hair, here's an uncharacteristic photo of Utada Hikaru of Japan and America-

Awesome hairstyle

Solid_Choke · Post by **Solid_Choke** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 8:35 am

I really like how Chinese the model looks. It is so exciting to see this stuff happening. I'm grateful that you are still working on this project. Thanks and keep up the good work!

Jetsetlemming · Post by **Jetsetlemming** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 8:46 am

DDL wrote:I suspect it would have to be masked, not translucent.

Masking would look ok(ish) as long as the texture size is fairly huge so you don't see the sharp joins.

The problem with DX translucency is it's based on strict RGB values, with full white being 100% visible, and full black being 0% visible.

So translucent black hair would be...invisible.

Ideally, we'd be able to do it via a modulated texture setting (where grey (128,128,128) is invisible and everything either side is increasingly visible), but I don't think we can do those, annoyingly.

It can be super dark brown hair rather than fully 0,0,0 black, can't it?

James T · Post by **James T** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 9:45 am

MAGGIE CHOW, IN DA FRESH!

This is pretty damn good, on the whole. My criticisms:

Here's a lady of rather pleasant proportions (the snap on the lower right is quite illustrative), and, just to bolster my observation a bit, here's a skinnier person. I'm not going to break out the Buchenwald pics, but let's just say that no matter how skinny you get, the jawbone is part of your framework, so it... doesn't change in a hurry.

Here's one of those wacky 'golden ratios' diagrams, which, idealism aside, are a good starting point if one is building a face. In blue, I've indicated a big part of the jawbone/face which I'm guessing you've angled too far back, rendering it essentially invisible in a face-front view. The jawbone is a real bastard, lots of artists get it wrong... especially me. But there it is! That's why she looks inhumanly gaunt. So if you wanna fix that, fix the jawbone. (you might've actually done this in your tweaks? Hard to say in the new shot, although it does look improved from the first.)

(Your models' heads and faces are actually a good chunk taller than those natural ratios, but I stretched the mask to fit Ms Chow's face, and the problem remained pretty much identical, so I figure I'm right.)

In other comments, I've actually met a good few older Chinese women with an upper lip approximately the shape of your Maggie's, but, while not ugly people, they... weren't movie stars, if you follow me. Plus, with the wedge cut out of the top of her lip (which I'm thinking looks extra-deep due to the nature of the shine around it), it's all a bit 'harelip surgery gone wrong' in that region. Plus, the original deep red lipstick suits her a lot better than the aubergine you've got there; the red's much more traditionally Asian too, which is definitely Chow's profile -- she wasn't part of the bleeding-edge cyberpunk cultural melange that gave us Walton Simons storming through government offices in a kimono and a mohican, she (like her apartment) was a lot more old-fashioned, in a 'classics never age, darling' sense.

And while we're on that topic, her hair is way off, unless what we're seeing now is the foundation of something that will look completely different. Big spiky 'dos like that are for women in power suits putting strangleholds on graphic design markets -- leading ladies know better. Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, Cate Blanchett (wait, who's not Australian?)... the A-listers leave it to the saps to experiment with the tops of their own heads; until awards night, these girls know the rule is that simple and conventional (and expensive) is beautiful, 'cos it doesn't distract from the looks with which they're blessed. Of course, that sense of the conventional changes (Marilyn Monroe's pretty but distinctly turn-of-the-'50s 'do, f'ex.), but even the '80s -- obviously the darkest period for hairstyling in living memory -- was pretty good to its female A-listers, so it's well wide of the mark to have Maggie Chow jutting spikes like a two-fisted Chinese businesswoman. I thought your embellishment of Nicolette was perfect, but I don't see why you want to run from Maggie's hairdo -- even if the low-poly was punishingly vague, it was just a Hepburn-ish short 'do with a bit of fringe, pinned back with a few hairs loose, no? (I just tried firing up Deus Ex to check from more angles, but all I got for my effort was a crashed game and a currently-fucked monitor gamma; eesh! At least I didn't lose this post...) I like how you've done the fringe though.