Female head texture work

Goeddy

So i didnt make the DA-contest deadline and decidet to turn stuff around a bit, to focus on improving my weaknesses.

Instead of doing a full char i am going to focus on her head only, but push that realy as far as possible.

The new core focus is realy on texture work and presentation since i got a HP i realy like, and that should be sufficient for what i want to do.

So the goal is get her looks as realistic as i can.
along the way i will document all the steps i take to achieve my final result.

Gues its done now:



older stuff



and the HP:


any crits and feedback would be more then welcome.

Goeddy

some progress here:

praetus

What are your render settings? This looks like marmoset but you have this...blue tint? It's throwing me off from giving you an honest critique because I feel like I'm having to see what is your render settings vs your actual texture. Overall, I think it's a good start. I think the eyes are way to white right now and you need some falloff in the sclera. I think that you could really push the color temps on the face. Granted you don't want her to look like she has a 5 o'clock shadow but pushing the color further could help.

I'd also love to see a color shift near the horns. At the very least you have bone under the skin where the transition is that should be discolored or ruddy. Also, some red on the ears (unless you're going to let a transmission mask handle that.)

Goeddy

yep all valid points
it is indeed marmoset, i intend to keep this setting for the final presentation, thats why i adjusted all the maps so they work nicely.
for the purpose of visibility i will turn the post effects off for future WIPs.
for the eyes i thought it may be the lacking AO for wich i intend to add a fake-ao-plane for the eyes. but you are right, they need to be darkened anyways.

and for the horns i didnt do anything right now, i wanted to adjust the skin there when i am working with horns, so they match up right.

i already got a transmission mask but you are right, it has to be stronger at on the ears.

thx for the crits mate

ysalex

To be honest I think that marmoset Polaroid filter, even with dialed back chromatic abb, is way overused. It also happens to obscure people's work, and doesn't look that great (it desatrates your image, blurs it with CA, and overlays everything in blue. This tends to kill skin tones.) Anyways, the main drawback for a portfolio being that now you're just another person using just another filter that does your work no justice, and an art director might think you used it because there are flaws you're trying to hide in you work.

RMeeks

Currently, it looks like she has a lazy eye.

Not sure if you have addressed spec at all, but it could be cool to add some oil to her t-zone and such. Her lips could be a bit glossy as well. Assuming she isn't wearing a bunch of makeup.

Goeddy

minor update here, tweaked the spec/gloss, eyebrightness, disabled post effects, gave her a smile to test my blendshapes and addet early dif for the horns and paralax for her eyes.
the light setting is dawn in marmoset, everything at default only sharpen cranked to 1.00



also a lil shot of my max settup displaying wireframe, eye-look-at´s and blendshapes:



@ysalex
yeyeye i get it, no more post effects for wip´s
still in the end my goal is to achieve an appealing result and excluding something that helps me achieve that doesnt sound reasonable to me.
although in my defense i usualy build my post effects settings from default, and not from the polaroid filter.

@rmeeks

what exactly do you mean with "t-zone"?

anyways; eyes are incredibly hard to pull of, i just recognized. i´ve been tweaking them quite sometime until i gave up and build a rig. still not perfect though.

spec is already there, i tweaked it a bit for the lips. you can´t realy see it in static shots though.

thanks for your input guys!

Aga22

t zone is the area above the eyebrows and down the nose

your morphs look too elastic, id say get some reference of expressions

Goeddy

thx aga22, im not shure if i should add spec there, but i will keep it in mind for the final beautyshot polishing.
for the morph, they realy are only for testing out some timple mouthshapes. its not like someone´s gonna animate her or something. just to make it quicker and easier to experiment with some expressions.

so im back in action, and here is my first hair attempt. still a lot to fix. also minor fixes on the eyelashes and horntransition. although they both are not final either.

Goeddy

so i think i´ll leave her at this.
here some more shots for you guys:


for the textures it was way more iterration then anything else, since almost nothing initially worked like i planned it. learned a lot though :P

for the dif the most usefull thing was definitly references, not only photos but also from different artists.
i baked a lot of maps for her in xnormal, having a large selection of effects comes in realy handy. maps i baked where: normals, bent-normals, ao, cavity, curvature, proximity and heigt map.

most of those maps i used for her face-spec and gloss, and for the horn dif.
also i used tesselation on her face and horns, and paralx distortion for her eyes.

the hair was a pain in the ass,i redit it several times, still not very good though.
what i learned is for hair you better go with a few realy simple snippets and tweak them until they look realy bland and don´t have anything that jumps out the pattern.
then placing the straints is the easier part, although it may take quite some time.

well i gues she turned out not too bad though