Finished up this real-time portrait. My goal was to aim for a quality high enough to be used as a digital double in film but, optimized for games/VR. All running in Marmoset, sculpted in Zbrush with no scans, detailed with a mixture of hand sculpting/custom alphas and Texturexyz, textures painted in Mari.
I would recommend Maya too, there's a lot you can do with the software. I have seen many indie and AA studios specifying blender in their job posts. This is likely a combination of the versatility of blender and no cost to use it commercially. Depending on the pipeline though you'll be limited to what software is used so…
For painting on 3D objects? That's wildly inefficient with all the 3D options out there, and they aren't new. Mudbox, 3D Coat, Substance Painter, Mari, Quixel. Even ZBrush would probably be better.
A project I made to improve my character skills. It's a semi-realistic take on Young Nahoko from "The wind rises". Modeling done in zbrush/maya, texturing in Mari, shading, lighting and rendering with Arnold. Xgen hair. On my Artstation too: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/5484z
Thanks everyone, there are some really helpful comments here. Especially yours Mark :) My problem is mainly with calculating a fixed price. Someone comes over, asks me to use a very crappy ortho to model a character they've had designed, tells me they have very little time and they want a good price. O_O I'm then stuck…
Great job! It's good to take note early on what needs to be on the mesh itself, and what can be done just by the texture. UV Mapping is tricky, and the "proper" method is going to be different for every single model that you make. Once you start adding textures, you'll see what works and what doesn't work for that model.…
January 18th: a top hat I did the second part of the tutorial from yesterday but I ran into a problem with doing that UV mapping stuff. The Ambient Occlusion Bake thing doesn't work at all and returns an error for me no matter how many times I try to go back and start over again. Also when I try to take the exported UV…
The save incremental "max saveplus" command is separate, with no modifiable parameters for version or file name like "saveMaxFile". BUT the version might already be saved into the existing file and the save incremental command just caries it over like it does with a lot of the other settings? So you MIGHT need to just save…
@Tits Thanks, Marie! Finished up the retopology and added some hair strands, eyeball shadow and eyelashes (which are barely visible for some reason) Did some shader setup and lighting. On to the textures soon :]