Random question. Which (Genesis) character would you use as a starting point for Ronnie James Dio?
tj_1ca9500b
Posts: 2,047
We are coming up on the 8th anniversary of the passing of Ronnie James Dio (July 10th, 1942 - May 16th 2010), a musician that definitely left his mark on the Heavy Metal/Hard Rock music community, as well as a number of lives.
Apparenlty, there is a memorial featuring a statue of him in Bulgaria.
Despite the dark nature of some of his songs, people that I've known that have met him in person said that he was one of the nicest persons they ever met He did some fun collaborations too - he's the voice of Dr X on Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime II, did a cameo on Pat Boone's album 'In a Metal Mood', appeared as himself in South Park and in Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, and a bunch of other things...
- Rolling Stone magazine eulogized Dio with these words: "It wasn't just his mighty pipes that made him Ronnie James Dio — it was his moral fervor...what always stood out was Dio's raging compassion for the lost rock & roll children in his audience. Dio never pretended to be one of the kids — he sang as an adult assuring us that we weren't alone in our suffering, and some day we might even be proud of conquering it"
There are a number of albums out there that he and his various bandmates have left for us. His later albums have a lot less notoriety, but if you like this sort of music and haven't listened to Magica yet, that's my personal recommendation (it's a concept album, in which Ronnie tells us the story of a world which is invaded, it's fall, and eventual salvation). Some good tunes on that album...
Anyways, back on topic Looking at Ronnie's face, which Genesis figure comes to mind as the best starting point? I pay less attention to the males in my Daz collection, and my facial morphs collection isn't that strong on the male side. I have the most morphs for Genesis 3, but am open to all recommendations.
I'm looking to do one of Dio in his 'prime', although even then he had rather harsh facial features. This is a passion project for me. If a morph comes out of this, I'll share my results (for free) assuming that the likeness ends up coming out fairly decent.
The hair shouldn't be too hard, but recommendations there are also welcome!
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Comments
I would start with about 80% Michael 8 and 20% Ollie 8. And use Ollie's skin texture set, not Michael 8's.
I'd go with G8, but I would suggest that whoever was trying used the one they had the most morphs for, if they had few for G8 or G3.
+1
Thanks for the suggestion guys!
Here's the starting point I came up with for now...
Obviously not there yet, but this looks like a good starting point to me...
Head dials:
I may need to simplify this combination a bit, but that's how I made the starting point shown above. Obviously the lips, jaw, nose, etc. could use additional adjustments, but as a starting point this looks promising to me...
Skin shown is from Altern8:
BTW, using Oleander Hair for now, until a better suggestion surfaces...
I'm trying to figure out if Ronnie's eyes were Blueish Gray or Greenish Gray... I'm leaning blue, but if anyone has a good pic of his eyes...
I'll keep everyone posted. In the meantime, any suggestions that you may have r.e. starting points, hair, etc. are welcome!
I'm not sure if you have access to Facegen, but if you do I would start playing with that first. Be sure to export into whatever version of Genesis you have the most morph packages for. Like a lot of heavy rock musicans, finding a 'neutral' face pose may not work out well, as I am sure Ronnie was in the habit of arching his eyebrows and pursing his lips whenever a publicity photographer came rambling over.
He indeed is still missed. His work on Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath is my favorite of both his and Sabbath's long careers.
rock on!
j
OK, slowly plugging away at dialing things in.
Even if I don't 'nail this', it's already turning out to be a rather interesting face...
Playing around with Edward 8's Altern8 textures now. In a rather fitting accident, Altern8 deleted the eye textures... (just had to share).
The two pics flanking my WIP are on plane primitives. Doing this makes it quite easy to reference the features of the subject character and fortunately the pic on the left included that very nice profile shot, that is very helpful when trying to figure out the nose shape, chin, etc...
Still pushing dials around, and of course I don't have the exact dials I need in a couple of places... I haven't even thought about the body shape yet (those are usually much easier to dial in).
Mainly I'm just sharing the devilish/white eye 'accident'... Back to work!
His jaw at least was closer in the 1st attempt but excellent work so far.
Very nice start! I'd go with curlier hair (there's an older "rock star" hair that might work well over on "that other site"); also the Warrior Wet hair would give you a similar hairline and look, I think.
The first attempt wasn't really an attempt, it was just coming up with a dial mix of G8M faces that was somewhat close to create a baseline/starting point. Thanks for the compliment!
I'll look around for those! Thanks for the recommends! The Oleander hair was close enough for what I needed for now/showed the right amount of forehead. And thanks for the compliment!
I need to see which characters I don't really need in the dial mix/which ones I can substitute area morphs with, now that I'm plugging along with this. No sense using six characters as baselines if they all aren't all actually needed...
This usually takes me a while (I usually stop at some point and come back the next day with fresh eyes), but in the meantime I'm still plugging away...
Just wanted to pop in and say Edward, at least for the skin... but you already found that.
I love Ronnie James Dio! He was God!
I'm really keen to see how far you get with that. Looks like a good start already.
Good luck!
If you need a bass guitar later for his band, you'll find one in my store... ;)
Just browsed through my hairs...
Free Spirit Hair might work : https://www.daz3d.com/free-spirit-hair-for-genesis-3-female-s
Doesn't look like at a first sight but it has a Crimped version that looks like that at Edward 8: (see attached image)
Kind regards, Eagle99
Nice job, look forward to seeing more of this. Dio was a big imspiraton when I started out as a rock musician.
OK, progress report time.
Somehow, I ended up creating Ray Liotta...
I saved this result to a separate file for later use. Maybe I'll do a Ray Liotta lookalike when I'm done (I wasn't intending to...). Maybe if I try hard to dial in Ray Liotta more closely, then I'll get closer to Ronnie (j/k)...
This was an attempt to make this a G8F figure only, with no other faces dialed in. Anyways I found this amusing, so I thought I'd share. At one point I had the figure looking a lot like an older Leonard Nimoy... (no pic to share there).
Well back to work. The Edward textures included with Altern8 didn't look right to me, so I'm going to try something else...
I really like that eye glitch render you have.
I tried to make a younger version of Dio with FaceGen, using a photo I found of him. I think its ok, it even managed to show some of the aymmetries in his face. Dio has a very assyemetrical face, and I'm not sure if many morphs are going to be able to really replicate that. You will probably need to dive into Hexagon to truly capture this man. I added a nose bridge bump from some morphs, and the rest is the morph that FaceGen created. However I don't have a single hair in my library that suits him, and then I realized this hair makes him look a bit like that guy from The Breakfast Cub, LOL.. I used Super Natural Brows (for females as I don't have the male version.) Facegen is terrible at eye textures, so these are eyes from Chance for Owen 8.
This is the reference photo I used.
Yeah I may go back to the eye glitch one. Trying to do this with just G3M morphs hasn't quite done the job. I should still have that one saved (I save to different filenames progressively as I work), I dunno, maybe I could export to .obj (with and without a few more tweaks, I like how that one looks as is, even it it's not quite Dio) and call it a day. Not sure if that's a nono though...
Facegen didn't do too bad of a job. And of course it generates skin textures too, which would be helpful... Maybe I'll pick it up someday when it's on sale...
I ended up frankensteining two hairs together (one really curly one along with the one I originally used). If I stay with that formula, I'll do some DFormer work to clean things up maybe...
I hadn't picked up on the face assymetry. Maybe that's what's throwing my eyes/instincts off... Also, thanks for posting that pic. It looks like an excellent reference point!
Seems like the biggest difference is the head/face aren't long enough. They is a G8 morph package that will do that but I don't own it & I forget the name.
LOL, literally I don't know the Breakfast Club guy's name or have I even even seen The Breakfast Club but I recognize him your render. I must remember the old ads I saw. I think when you look at them comparitively you think OK, FaceGen has gotten it pretty accurate but there is that 'dolling up' effect that a 3D model with limited texture 'looks' and iRay gives. I think the biggest difference is Dio from the pictures I've seen has more olive skin tone.
Yeah, the pic is more pale than what Dio normally is, but it was one of the better source pics of his face I could find for that era. I'm thinking some translucency can fix that. And indeed, the lighting wiped out some detail that looks good in the viewport, so I need to work on that, too. And I gotta do something for the hair. I thought I had a curly hair. I did some texture cleaning on what FaceGen gave me, mainly getting his hair out of his face texture.
And it is funny, I never paid much attention to Dio's asymmetry before, until I tried this. I suppose doing this Daz thing after a while has its side effects, LOL.
One side of his face/head is quite a bit shorter than the other side. Most people are like that but not to that degree.
Still plugging away at this.
I had hoped to have it wrapped up by today, but the morph dial nudging thing is taking longer than anticipated. More adjustments are needed (need food first), but I feel like I'm in the ballpark at least.
The middle of the lower lip & the top of the forehead needs higher. Pretty impressive work you've done.
Overall good job, but the face is a bit too square and big. I'd say alongate the face a bit more, go back to the previous skin texture, make eyes less glossy, move eyes a tiiiny bit apart and make them bigger (so the inner edge is in the same place), maybe adjust the eyelid curve a bit (an "asian" or "almond" slider could give the right result, I don't remember where I have it from), tilt eyes a tiny bit (inner lower), make lips a bit less prominent. Reduce pupil size, unless you're going for a "drugged" look
I met Ronnie in 1986. He was indeed a very nice person. He seemed to be about 5' tall.
Nice work so far!! I would also use an older face texture, maybe Edward
Thanks for the suggestions guys.
I already have the face length morph stretched 200% (had to widen the parameters), along with a few other morphs that factor into this. I can stretch even further but that's when weirdness starts to creep in.
I tried the other textures, but the eyebrows are all wrong. Texturing is something I'll focus on after I get the shape dialed in. I'm using Vini's maps now, but if I can figure out how to make them look less smooth and maybe some very minor color tweaks... well that's new territory for me. I had hoped for something 'out of the box' but perhaps that's not currently an option. Plus I was hoping to keep this simple for others that might want to use it after I'm done (i.e. not require 8 different characters, etc.). There are others that are much more skilled than I at making characters, but I'm giving it my best shot.
I have a number of eye morphs going already, in an attempt to recreate how the crease on the upper eyelid is supposed to look, as well as the bags under the eyes. It's not perfect, but I've pushed my morph kits about as far as they can go, so I'm in D-Former territory now. I'm using a D-Former on the right nostril btw, in an attempt to replicate that assymetry.
There's a couple of areas that the various morph kits aren't touching, which is pissing me off. I have a couple of G8M morph kits besides the 'default' addon kits, but as y'all know you won't always get just the morph shapers you need. I know how to work with D-Formers, but they are what I consider fallbacks as they take time to dial in, plus if you need symmetry that might mean two different D-Formers.
A perfect example of an area that I'm having issues targetting is the area between the cheekbones and the jaw corners - there's an indent there that my morphs aren't addressing, so I'll likely have to create two D-Formers just for that.
I haven't adjusted rigging to shape yet, as I'm trying to get the morphs as close as I can before I do that. I've noticed that repeatedly adjusting rigging to shape can result in artifacts creeping in...
Anyways, I'm not there but as I said, I feel like i'm in the ballpark at least. Thanks for the additional observations, and I'll take a look at the areas y'all mentioned if I'm not focused on those already.
I don't think I'll have this done by tomorrow, but I'm laser focused on getting this done, and will return to other projects afterwords.