@polymator Yeah I had the same doubts but I felt it looked ok without the blues. @lotet I know, it's a fine balance! But I also think it has to do with the fact that (in the previous update) the hair and eyes weren't done at all yet - still in blockout phase. I feel that now I'm getting closer to finishing everything it's coming together more nicely. A final balancing tweak will be necessary in any case, I think. I also tweaked the paint a bit to be more accurate and easier to read from a distance. This might help
So 'nother update: The eyes have been done; I used Photoshop for this actually because I wanted to create the eye texture 100% by hand and I couldn't in Painter. I made a noise and put a radial blur on it, imported that in Substance to get some "veinyness" in the iris and continued from there. The texture from Painter I combined with some material tweaks in TB2 - a paralax depth map, and a shell with transparancy made it all a bit more realistic. Also modeled a carnucle and tearline. Great tip I got: the sides of the eyes are not supersmooth as the lens is, so adding a bit of veins in the height and roughing up the sides made the glossyness much better. Now the sharp highlight is only so strong on the colored part in the middle; the lens.
Another thing I took a stab at is the hair. OMG what a challenge. I almost wish I placed haircards. To make this work with the rest of the materials and style has proven to be a challenge. In fact, to texture anything in the hair has been a challenge. It's still not finished at all but I wanted to show you anyway - in the hopes of getting some tips or pointers. Right now I've been working with smart mask that use AO, Position gradient and most importantly; Curvature. This works to a certain extent, especially on the head-hair it looks cool imo. Combined with a nice Secondary Anisotrophic specular in TB2 it's an almost acceptable result, but this is usually not the level I aim at. I want it to be awesome ^^ I've painted a flow map for the head-part as well (this was the easiest part, no curly shapes ) but not yet for the loose hair. This will make it better, sure, but it won't make a world of difference. To paint in some height/roughness/color variations by hand is just....crazy. Painters way of ...well, painting, just doesn't work for the strokes I want to put down. I need a better lazy mouse, and a "mask by topology continuity" to keep me sane. I can do it, sure, but there must be a better way.
There's a dutch expression that's very applicable here: I have my hands in my hair over this.
Horns, Eyebrows and Lashes are not done yet! Thanks for the feedback guys
The eyes look great, a little thing I like to do is ad metalness or colored spec to the iris. It really helps to ad that extra glow.
as for the hair, I think it looks great from a distance, but I definitely see what your saying. maybe go back to the sculpt and ad finer hairs and more creases for the normals to pick up? you could also try adding more stray hair (meshes) for some extra detail. If I recall correctly you did have some of that in the sculpt at some point.
I agree with lotet; it looks good from a distance. I'm just gonna throw ideas and maybe something works for you.
- Try applying the skin shader in marmo to the hair, it'll give you a softer fuzzier look for the hair which you may like. - Try placing a couple of hair cards with alphas to represent flyaway hair. If you go overboard with this it could break the style you're going for
- I don't like the feel of the substance brush engine either, it feels too rigid and unresponsive. So I usually do one of two things that work for me but they're not quick... a) 3d coat. If you have 3d coat import the low poly and the individual maps that you've got so far in substance and paint on top. It offers nearly the same fidelity as photoshop for me and it has a lazy mouse function in there too. I use this for albedo, spec and gloss variations. Normal/height painting I leave for substance painter. b) Zbrush. If you don't have 3d coat repeat the same process as above but in Zbrush. If you don't like painting in Zbrush you could always use the goZ plugin to setup a connection to Photoshop and paint away.
I'll finish the horns and tweak some stuff, and then give a decent update on how I did the hair nstuffs Quite happy with the result. Thanks a lot for the input - it helped a lot!
Allrighty - so some insight in how I (finally) got the hair to an acceptable point.
In the 2nd last post I made I got the hair specular looking kinda cool by adding a "secondary anisotrophic specular" in MarmoSet. This helped a lot and really pushed the freshness of the color and the shinyness, as healthy hair should have. (We've all seen those Pantene commercials). The thing that was frustrating me (sorry for the complains) was the lack of detail. Doing it in Painter wasn't a solution. After looking into some options and considering some proposals from Polymator and Lotet I went into Zbrush (who's brush handling I simply LOVE) and decided to sculpt in some more detail; some very fine creases. (Zoom in - they're really fine)
I baked the new normals, AO and Curvature map but did not overwrite the old ones. Especially for the curvature this was a nice extra; I could still use the old curvature with the bigger shapes as mask on some layers, and could add a variation of the new, more defined curvature on other layers. The combination of rough shapes and details worked quite well; made it easy to read from a distance while still providing enough detail.
Once I got the colors tweaked, it started to look quite a lot better in Toolbag. The finer detail was really breaking up the specular and I guess this is what it needed. I painted a flow map in Painter, tweaked the shader's specular settings in toolbag and the result was instantly 50% better. I heavily underestimated how much difference the flowmap would give on the curls - as I had only tested it out on the head (=easy part ) and I hadn't seen it with the extra details. A bit of translucency ( with the skin shader as you suggested, @polymator ) also helped.
The horns were made in a similar way as the hair - flow map, nice stripy detail, translucency, good variation on roughness. I found THE coolest reference for horns by the way - was a bit hyped over it so I wanna share it with yall ^^. DO check it out...Here
Here's a screenshot of the shader settings for the hair. Of course the roughness map, thickness map and so on were made to make this shader work properly.
And some more screenshots!
Getting really at the end of it now. I'll add some depth in the colors of the cloth, texture the muffin and put her in a pose.
Saw these on artstation like an hour ago was just waiting for you to update the thread aswell, hair is looking awesome, and its really starting to come together overall.
how did you make the flowmap? and yeah, those horns where super cool, I think yo made yours a tad bit fibery/noise though.
Here's the road I followed for the flowmap: https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Flow+Map+Painting Pretty straightforward method (it does feel like wizardry). I've been pondering the horns as well, but I feel like they read well from a distance now. I'll keep your feedback in mind and play around with it some more, maybe...
Here's a very last shot of her in a T-pose. Did some work on everything and finally textured the muffin.
In the meantime I started rigging this thingy in Maya (real quick). If all goes according to plan, I should have her in a pose and rendered by the end of this weekend!
Replies
So 'nother update:
The eyes have been done; I used Photoshop for this actually because I wanted to create the eye texture 100% by hand and I couldn't in Painter. I made a noise and put a radial blur on it, imported that in Substance to get some "veinyness" in the iris and continued from there.
The texture from Painter I combined with some material tweaks in TB2 - a paralax depth map, and a shell with transparancy made it all a bit more realistic. Also modeled a carnucle and tearline.
Great tip I got: the sides of the eyes are not supersmooth as the lens is, so adding a bit of veins in the height and roughing up the sides made the glossyness much better. Now the sharp highlight is only so strong on the colored part in the middle; the lens.
Another thing I took a stab at is the hair. OMG what a challenge. I almost wish I placed haircards. To make this work with the rest of the materials and style has proven to be a challenge. In fact, to texture anything in the hair has been a challenge. It's still not finished at all but I wanted to show you anyway - in the hopes of getting some tips or pointers.
Right now I've been working with smart mask that use AO, Position gradient and most importantly; Curvature. This works to a certain extent, especially on the head-hair it looks cool imo. Combined with a nice Secondary Anisotrophic specular in TB2 it's an almost acceptable result, but this is usually not the level I aim at. I want it to be awesome ^^
I've painted a flow map for the head-part as well (this was the easiest part, no curly shapes
) but not yet for the loose hair. This will make it better, sure, but it won't make a world of difference.
To paint in some height/roughness/color variations by hand is just....crazy. Painters way of ...well, painting, just doesn't work for the strokes I want to put down. I need a better lazy mouse, and a "mask by topology continuity" to keep me sane. I can do it, sure, but there must be a better way.
There's a dutch expression that's very applicable here: I have my hands in my hair over this.
Horns, Eyebrows and Lashes are not done yet!
Thanks for the feedback guys
as for the hair, I think it looks great from a distance, but I definitely see what your saying. maybe go back to the sculpt and ad finer hairs and more creases for the normals to pick up? you could also try adding more stray hair (meshes) for some extra detail. If I recall correctly you did have some of that in the sculpt at some point.
I'm just gonna throw ideas and maybe something works for you.
- Try applying the skin shader in marmo to the hair, it'll give you a softer fuzzier look for the hair which you may like.
- Try placing a couple of hair cards with alphas to represent flyaway hair. If you go overboard with this it could break the style you're going for
- I don't like the feel of the substance brush engine either, it feels too rigid and unresponsive. So I usually do one of two things that work for me but they're not quick...
a) 3d coat. If you have 3d coat import the low poly and the individual maps that you've got so far in substance and paint on top. It offers nearly the same fidelity as photoshop for me and it has a lazy mouse function in there too. I use this for albedo, spec and gloss variations. Normal/height painting I leave for substance painter.
b) Zbrush. If you don't have 3d coat repeat the same process as above but in Zbrush. If you don't like painting in Zbrush you could always use the goZ plugin to setup a connection to Photoshop and paint away.
Hope this helps.
I'll finish the horns and tweak some stuff, and then give a decent update on how I did the hair nstuffs
Thanks a lot for the input - it helped a lot!
In the 2nd last post I made I got the hair specular looking kinda cool by adding a "secondary anisotrophic specular" in MarmoSet. This helped a lot and really pushed the freshness of the color and the shinyness, as healthy hair should have. (We've all seen those Pantene commercials).
The thing that was frustrating me (sorry for the complains) was the lack of detail. Doing it in Painter wasn't a solution. After looking into some options and considering some proposals from Polymator and Lotet I went into Zbrush (who's brush handling I simply LOVE) and decided to sculpt in some more detail; some very fine creases.
(Zoom in - they're really fine)
I baked the new normals, AO and Curvature map but did not overwrite the old ones. Especially for the curvature this was a nice extra; I could still use the old curvature with the bigger shapes as mask on some layers, and could add a variation of the new, more defined curvature on other layers. The combination of rough shapes and details worked quite well; made it easy to read from a distance while still providing enough detail.
Once I got the colors tweaked, it started to look quite a lot better in Toolbag. The finer detail was really breaking up the specular and I guess this is what it needed. I painted a flow map in Painter, tweaked the shader's specular settings in toolbag and the result was instantly 50% better. I heavily underestimated how much difference the flowmap would give on the curls - as I had only tested it out on the head (=easy part
The horns were made in a similar way as the hair - flow map, nice stripy detail, translucency, good variation on roughness. I found THE coolest reference for horns by the way - was a bit hyped over it so I wanna share it with yall ^^. DO check it out...Here
Here's a screenshot of the shader settings for the hair. Of course the roughness map, thickness map and so on were made to make this shader work properly.
And some more screenshots!
Getting really at the end of it now. I'll add some depth in the colors of the cloth, texture the muffin and put her in a pose.
Thanks for watching and stay classy San Diego
how did you make the flowmap?
and yeah, those horns where super cool, I think yo made yours a tad bit fibery/noise though.
Pretty straightforward method (it does feel like wizardry). I've been pondering the horns as well, but I feel like they read well from a distance now. I'll keep your feedback in mind and play around with it some more, maybe...
Did some work on everything and finally textured the muffin.
In the meantime I started rigging this thingy in Maya (real quick). If all goes according to plan, I should have her in a pose and rendered by the end of this weekend!
Cuz who doesn't like a bit of rigging when it'snt necessary at all.
Artstation better quality here
Big thanks to @almighty_gir and @Lextripper and everyone here for helping me out! Big love!
Congrats for finishing!