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Super Square 1 - Oly yeez those abs. I felt like this sculpt saw huge improvements over the last pages'. Except in the arms. Those turned out weirdly short-feeling. One part because of the camera angle, one part because I built up the muscle without building out the side so well. But I think the abdomen was where my best work was. Sadly, I don't think I'll be able to keep up that level of quality on the big guy. It's quite a bit harder than other sculpts. However, over this page, I settled on removing the AO but including a normal map output from ZBrush as a bump map. It really helps restore some of the detail in the shapes that get lost in the mesh export process. This one is especially notable, as I tried something different with Mr. muscles' swim trunks. One idea I had is that the Lapsa could have two kinds of sheaths. One commonly where membrane or something keeps the structure up against the pelvis normally, lowering it like a drawbridge when aroused. The other, being that the membrane is simply not present and it always hangs down like a human thing. This fellow was planned to have the latter type. I ultimately decided not to make that distinction (though the mesh and rig technically supports it with some shape oddities). Briefly, however, on this page I experimented with letting him have that. The biggest advantage is you don't have that structure pushing clothing up. So here, having loosened the strength of the waistband and fiddled with some other settings, the swim trunks hang down low. Really low >w>. Honestly, it can look really good in shots and I was sorely tempted to allow it. But, he's already been depicted differently and there are some disadvantages too like ill fitting clothes hanging odd. More on that later.

I also really love how Yeltsin turned out on this page, the lighting played very nicely with me this time.

W1 (Top Right) - Same poses, same swim trunks, but different angle. I thought this would give me more room for text, but I didn't like the framing ultimately. Still, shows off that tantalizingly low hang, just barely clinging to his hips and- Uh. That's lot of waisted space on the side. I also ultimately found I wasn't happy with how the flower-like things looked this close up. I didn't want to draw too much attention to them. Yeltsin required quite a lot of sculpt work to get this head-in-knees pose to look plausible. It's no secret that that torsos on my characters are a bit long and while that has help in some ways in the past, more and more I find problems caused by it. Here, the back and chest just couldn't reach a natural looking position with the Maya rigging. So instead, in ZBrush, I had to pull and push them like taffy into such an arrangement. He's really sitting on his lower back and I did some significant work to make his butt look more like leg to fit into a more natural arrangement. Thankfully, it's quite dark and often obscured, so it's much harder to identify lingering positioned anatomy that doesn't make sense.

W2 (Mid Right) - Another alt-shot, where the swim trunks are allowed to hang low. You can see here the tail holds them up still, creating a pretty ugly sloping effect on the clothes from most angles. Unfortunately, the tail and rear just isn't positioned well for the alternative approach. Unfortunately, this shot is from before I included the normal maps so you don't get to see the lovely work I did sculpting his back.

W3 (Bottom Left) - Another failed framing of the first shot. I did like how closed-in it felt but I didn't like the big black bars the planters create on the sides. Here you see the swim trunks up hight as they normally are. The one advantage this affords is it does help obscure the length of the torso some. The lighting here could have been better. That hanging hand casts an unfortunate shadow. Of particular note is the red suited Lapsa on the bench in the background. No, he wasn't there before. In the course of this page, I discovered a maddeningly obscure bug in my Zone Crowd Builder script (the code I use to manage the background crowds and how they're dressed). A particular, somewhat rarely used crowd type unfortunately had the chance to sometime arrange different Lapsa (this has significant psuedo-random elements so the same crowd and or scene should always produce the Lapsa the same way) into different positions. It took basically 2 evenings to figure out and when I did, I realized I had already discovered it years ago, but chosen to leave it in for consistency sake. I made a much better note of it this time and corrected it, providing details on how to undo it if necessary for older scene reshoots. What made it so difficult was it seemed to not-quite random. If you reloaded the scene, it would come up with new arrangements but reruns after the first time always produce the same result, barring certain rare and ultimately unknown circumstances. What I finally figured out was that it wasn't an issue with the randomness, nor the crowd or how it chose its position targets and Lapsa. Instead, it was the order of the targets provided to it. I had distinctly noted the order was important in the methods used by other crowds. The method automatically sorts the targets into a list and returns it. But, in writing this particular, incredibly simple crowd, I had opted to put that as a set of keys in a hashmap to their various allowable roles (which define what poses they are allowed to take in goal spots chosen by the crowd). The hashmap was fine and necessary, but I didn't want to bother passing in the list too, so I simply pulled out the key list as the targets, completely forgetting that they needed to be in sorted order to remain consistently chosen. Hashmaps are not guaranteed to be in any particular order, but they are very often in the same order anyways. So, it was a fairly rare chance that they stopped being in the same order, but consistent enough to be noticed and increasingly drove me to outlandish hypotheses while diagnosing the problem the first night. I was already extremely exhausted by that point so it was not the best time to be debugging, lol.

T4-T7 - Before settling on the final layout, which wasn't the planned arrangement but was much closer to it, I had the idea of using Tall shot shapes in the middle row. Originally, he wasn't going to have the reaction shots but I just felt it worked better to show his reaction and kind of train of thought. These each were from before I decided he needed a little helper light on the side to reduce the extreme shadows on his face. It also demonstrates (by way of poor positioning) that indeed that ceiling light was behind him all the time. I really just tilted the camera to give him his idea bulb lol. The last two shots really are just to fill some space on this rejected shots page. Nothing particularly special about them other than the fact that I don't like their camera angles. Though, admittedly I do like how Yeltsin looks in that 2nd to last one. Even if the big guy's hand is sticking out behind him and his collar is clipping horribly.