March monthly contest: "Male"

[joepal]

In an attempt to interest people to rebalance the MakeGirl ( ) bias in the repos, I'm announcing a new instance of the monthly contest. This time the theme is "male fashion". (EDIT: now just "male")

The rules of the contest are the same as a year ago: Interpret the theme any way you want, and submit a 1920x1080 render before the end of March.

For full rules as well as prior winners and contributions, see http://www.makehumancommunity.org/conte ... ntest.html

[wolgade]

In an attempt to interest people to rebalance the MakeGirl ( ) bias in the repos,

Nice try.

[DredNicolson]

The bias comes from most of the community consisting, as far as I know, of straight men.

But I think that's not the only reason. Modern male fashion, at least in the West, leans heavily towards the utilitarian and away from the exhibitionist. Clothing lines often seem to include it only as an afterthought. You've seen one tuxedo, you've seen them all, you might say. Compare that to the hundreds of different dress designs for women. Or compare men's shoes to women's shoes.

In short, male clothes are mostly drab and boring to make.

But I'll give it a shot.

[jujube]

I'm not straight OR a man, so I probably could/should contribute something to the contest... gotta set more time aside to work on MH experiments.

[loki1950]

Who says it has to be modern and there is always military dress uniforms for various periods and cultures ie: Highlander,Napoleon Old Guard or Elizabethan court formal.

Enjoy the Choice

[wolgade]

The bias comes from most of the community consisting, as far as I know, of straight men.

That's undeniable.

In short, male clothes are mostly drab and boring to make.

That's right. If you have a look at what's on sale for men you'll find trousers and shirts. That's it. On the other hand: What do I wear? A pair of trousers and a shirt. I wouldn't buy anything else. Even more, I'll buy clothes when I need to do. This might be true for many men. Most woman buy clothes, because they want to do. An average woman ownes more clothes and shoes than an average man.

Another aspect is that convincing trousers are quite hard to do. I'm talking about the deformations when you lift the leg and bend the knee. In real life you get big wrinkles in the knee section and the bent leg get's lifted. Hard to model and impossible to do with MakeClothes.

Who says it has to be modern and there is always military dress uniforms for various periods and cultures

Of course, but why should I model a military dress uniform if don't need one? Most assets in the user repo weren't modelled just for the repo.

[joepal]

Ok, I hear you.

I'm going to change the topic from "male fashion" to just "male". That way there should be a wider range of interpretations available.

[grinsegold]

I'd like to make more male hair, including beards. I already collected a bunch of 3d scans of famous gods like Zeus and Lenin, to retopo their facial hair. But unless people like o4saken show me how they get the nice results in texturing strands, i can't dare to go on providing mediocre stuff. i mean, it is so easy using strand particles. Therefore the mesh hair has to be pretty convincing to have a right to exist. The advantage is timesaving at the stage of importing and in form of reduced rendertime. I really loved to be able to make better mesh hair. The ability to render an animation in a reasonable amount of time could be useful sometimes.

[grinsegold]

and good news for people waiting for more useful male cloth: This will probably be my next project after finishing Vader:



But first someone has to tell me how one would wear this in real world. 'Cause, if i understand the topology, i can model it.

[o4saken]

But unless people like o4saken show me how they get the nice results in texturing strands, .

Photoshop and a Drawing tablet. Colour your base one colour and then add darker and lighter strokes over the whole thing many times till it looks like hair. This is obviously not easy and requires a bit of practice, but does produce best results.

Easier yet still effective method if you are able to get good particle hair results - is to use blender. add a plane, align the camera looking directly over the plane, add particle hairs to the plane, comb the particles a bit, set background transparency on and render.
This method can be downloaded here as an already set up blend file - http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/25701

The above from blendswap works, but i prefer to set it up myself lighting etc.
As a very quick not good example at all as the beard is floating off of face slightly i rendered a plane that i made transparent with hair particles, saved this image, then take my human duplicated the beard area and assigned this new "hair texture" -

Hair texture is transparent and black hair so might not show up here.