Well it started off as a practice sculpt and I thought the face was interesting so I took it further…
500 samples
Interesting portrait, and nice practice!
Blender sculpt? dynatopo? with retopology?
Tonatiuh: Thank You. Yes it was sculpted in Blender using dynatopo and then I retopologized it. I further used multires to sculpt in pore details and slightly adjust few forms which were then baked out in a normal map.
Great workflow! did you use also the multires when rendering? Kent Trammell use to recommend that for better results.
Yes I used the first 2/5 subdivision levels of the multires for rendering.
I was referring to use all the subdivisions
Looks fantastic, but the big round head and he long skinny neck don’t quite mix well together. Characters with long necks usually have a thin and skinny appearance to match while large round heads, well, suggest a more large and round body frame.
Tonatiuh: Oh, the first 2 subdivision levels seemed like enough for this portrait since the normal map was dealing with the rest of the details.
The Omnilord: :yes: Thank you for your advice, the reference images that I used followed what you mentioned but I instead chose to experiment with a long skinny neck since it was a practice sculpt. I do agree that a bigger neck would suit him much better.
Can you test the difference please? that is something I always struggle with, but if Kent Trammell thinks that… well you know, he is like a God! hehe
XD Well I know how you feel because I also learned a lot from his tutorials. Using all the subdivision levels would defeat the purpose of the normal map and increase the render time significantly. However, It would also result in more pronounced details but since I sculpted mostly pores it made sense to rely more on the normal map maybe if there were wrinkles then I would have bumped up the subdivision levels. Whenever I get the time I will share the results…
That’s looking cool!
Neat concept overall, and nice textures and shader!
Looks like a real person. Maybe 'cause I know a guy that looks very much like that 
I think there’s room to improve this further without too much effort required.
A few things that kind of pop up when I look at this are beard groom, ears, eyelids and nose
Beard groom: It looks way too uniform. Are you using children with the groom? Try playing with Children > Interpolated > Curl (bottom) > Roughness: Uniform+Size and Random+Size+Threshold
Also, I think with reddish skin and freckles he’d have lighter hair tone. Maybe with a hint of red as well.
Ears: I feel like they are somewhere inbetween stylized and having realistic anatomy. I would push it to either of those directions rather than what you have currently. I feel like this concept could go well with either of the directions, hard to tell before you see it. If you do decide to tweak it, whatever the direction you pick, gather some references beforehand.
Eyelids: They feel too thin. Shouldn’t be too big of a deal to give them some thickness.
Nose is the bit that pops out the least. Pretty much same impression as the ears, but less prominent. It’s the area around the nose trills. The nose is a tuff one and I’d imagine it might be too much to tweak at this point.
As I mentioned, looks neat already, props! Just think you could take it to the next level with some relatively minor tweaks.
I think that nowadays it would make more sense to use the adaptive subdivision+(shader)displacement. It would be interesting to see how it affects a render like this
Wow! Thank you for your feedback. I found this really helpful because I’m not so knowledgeable on the particle system. I never thought of enabling the kink settings or tweaking the Roughness: Uniform+Size and Random+Size+Threshold settings. I didn’t plan on making any adjustments to it since it was for practice but I will consider your advise when taking on other projects… well like the one I’m working on now.
Well I tried testing it but Blender crashed(I have a crappy laptop anyways). Since it was for practice I don’t mind sharing the blend file. That is, if you would like to test it yourself?
I can try! if you want to share.
I uploaded the file to Blend Swap -->http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/87198 but it is still being moderated so not sure if you will be able to download it as yet.
I just did the test, it changes a loooooot:
5 subdivisions:
2 subdivisons:
see in full size to really see it.
Wow Nice, the details are much better I must admit…