How to improve this head without being 100% realistic?

This is intended to be a “doll head”. It’s not intended to be 100% realistic in the sense that I don’t want to add human-like imperfections or change the general proportions that I envisioned. At the same time I think there is room for improvement.


For example:

  • the skin is currently simply a base color + tweaked vertex color for makeup, made in Blender;
  • eyes use a relatively simple shader without textures;
  • hair is the best effort I could come up with at this stage both for modeling (using Blender’s hair system) and for the shading;
  • mesh topology isn’t perfect / purely made of quads, but I don’t need to animate this anyway;
  • …more?

I’m looking for pointers on how to improve this in ways that keep it cute!


Thread thumbnail below.


It looks fantastic! I maybe make the nose and the lips less prominent, ande the eyelids less thick, but I don’t know much about style characters.
Also, the ear looks too much realistic, for your character.

Thanks! For reference, the style is intended to be that of asian ball-jointed dolls (BJD). You can get a general idea of how they look like by searching for ‘BJD’ on Google images (may not be SFW) or Pinterest. I’m aware that the eyelids here are a bit on the thick side but it’s the way they usually are on these dolls.

The lips I actually made them a bit smaller compared to one of the earlier versions (which I didn’t post on blenderartists, see image below). Among other things besides ugly initial hair (which I’m still struggling with) here you can see an artifact of the Cycles Hair shader on the hairbrows which I don’t know how to manage/remove besides using a different shader. This is one of the several problems I’m looking to resolve. It’s in the render in the opening post too, just not as visible due to the shadow.


EDIT: here is a close up of the mesh of the head profile, you can see that several n-gons have been used to not add unnecessary loops and/or add detail where needed. I’ve seen professional modelers doing this, and personally I don’t find it to be a problem. If anything the topology is a bit messy because I rushed it towards the end and being relatively liberal with ngons may have made it worse.

This is not where I’m really seeking advice in this thread, though. You can also see that the ear(s) has pretty much been shoehorned onto the head, but it isn’t very visible anyway, so it’s probably fine, at least for the purposes of this render.


Among other things, in reference to the lips and nose, from this view they don’t seem too big.

The doll is fine as it is, but the hair is awful. have some variation the the way it is combed and maybe have thinner hairs? are you using a hair shader for the hairs?

I’m aware that the hair is terrible. One of the reasons is that it is quite unpractical/cumbersome to comb pretty much every strand one by one, but since hair particles cannot seem (from what I’ve seen so far) to be tweaked after physics has been applied, that’s the only choice. I think the task would be much easier if before styling hair could be allowed to fall down by gravity on the model, or in other words if I could select a frame in the hair physics simulation and make it the starting frame for further tweaking.

I tried searching a solution for this and I haven’t found any. Maybe it’s really not possible at all.

For the shading I indeed use a hair shader, but for some reason compared to other ones it makes the hair look kind of flat shaded. I’m not sure if “smooth shading” can be applied to hair particles, but again I tried to find this with no solution and it appears that to improve the shading hair geometry must be increased (which I would like to avoid in order to decrease building and render times).

This is the current hair shader setup, which is very simple (perhaps too much?)

I’ll try thinner hair. I think I originally made it relatively because it looked transparent otherwise and/or leave ugly gaps.


1: This Knot/Loop Material looks a bit off. Maybe make it thinner and put some velvet shader on it.
2: The Hairs, i know its hard to make a style and you did it fine, but maybe it would help to put a other hair system and just let them be short but they ned to fit on the head so the cuttet part doesnt looks out the head but the whole head look hairy…dunno just an idea.
3: Try to put a other mesh as emission maybe you can achieve a funny reflection. Or just put some more glossyness.
I like the doll, i mean it looks like a doll and the colors of the skin are good, it could be a bit more grainy, like the mat porcelain of this kind of dolls, you know what i mean?

I’ve applied some of the previous suggestions.


  • Knot material and geometry tweaked.
  • Hair thinner and somewhat tweaked. Still struggling a lot with this; I tried more extensive modifications but I thought I ruined it. I’m still not sure that I actually improved it.
  • Slightly brighter eyes with a different shader (but no texture yet)
  • Cat ears!

I’m not sure what would be a good way to add graininess to the skin that would be suitable in this case. It isn’t really real skin and not porcelain either. These dolls are usually made of smooth resin material.

As for the velvet material I did this, following an example from the internet. Again, very simple shader:

http://i.imgur.com/cvlhRuT.png

Good! much better!
so now we need to solve the hair problem ya? You are using only a diffuse and glossy shader? You could try to use a color ramp.
And could you make a render with more hairs? it looks like you could put some 100 more…but maybe im wrong…

Do you mean parent hairs or children hairs? I use very few parent hairs; most of the hair particles you see in the previous renders are children hairs. This is probably one of the main reasons why I’m having so many problems styling it, but on the other hand the more parent hairs there are the less manageable manually tweaking them becomes. So far I’ve used 750 children hairs per parent hair.


EDIT: here is the same render with 1000 children hairs per parent and tweaked hair shader:



Impressive thanks for sharing, need to get my simulation game better!

What do you mean exactly? How was this useful for you?

Hello again:D the hairs becomes better.
Did you tried out to make some waves or just a bit differences on the front hairs, because they looks all same and look to different as the water wavy hairs. you could tweak a bit on that, just make it wavy and then it will look terrible i know but changing the parameters like that: (this is a set i did, you dont need to set the values like on the picture but just try it out)


And ya, im not professional, so im just learning like you. Maybe its bullshit what im talking, just to let you know. ;))

It appears that “Cycles Hair Rendering” options are now under render settings:

http://i.imgur.com/35hOHax.png

I changed the primitive to “curve segments”, which improved noticeably the faceted shading I was getting on the hair.

I’ve tried to slightly change some hair children parameters, but I can’t seem to get satisfactory results. I guess the fringe now looks a bit less uniform, though.


EDIT: this might also be useful for others: over time I found that for the eyes it helps noticeably to not just model them like balls with a texture on top of them, but also giving some 3d structure to the iris and lens. I don’t have a precise recipe, but this is what I did in the image above.


The major issue with hair is that human hair doesn’t grow or behave this way. For better underdstanding I found references for you.



My first imperssion was “Oh man this is really weird haircut”. And it is indeed.
Bangs never looks like this. Hair don’t align paralelly. It goes from the top to the sides. I hope you can see this on my reference.
When it comes to waves or curls the same rule applies. Hair isn’t paralelly aligned. Individual hairs goups into segments and these segments go it’s own way wherever they want ;p Again look at the reference and notice how hair flows.
There are also individual hairs which separate from it’s segment and go completely diffret direction.
Hope it hepls. Long wavy hair is absolutely gorgeous but it has to look like natural human hair otherwise it’s just uncanny.

Yep, I realize that, perhaps I should take some references and study them in detail. I think the problem is that I was expecting the Blender hair physics simulation and children hair settings to somehow automatically deal with the “natural” flow of hair, I didn’t expect that significant manual tweaking would still be needed.

Anyway, coincidentally, right in this moment I was in the process of experimenting a bit more with the hair in Blender, trying to come up with something more convincing. Although the result is different than I initially planned when I made this thread (especially hair volume), maybe it’s overall a bit better now although it seems a bit messy. A major difference is that now for the front hair I’m using interpolated children instead of simple children. The latter don’t work correctly when there are only a few parent hairs, but I increased their number substantially in this test.



I should also fix the eyebrows shader, which currently is using the one for the hair. It doesn’t appear to work correctly on flat surfaces. Or perhaps eventually I should model the eyebrows differently.

Oh. and try the Hair info node as a factor between the transmission and reflection shader. Add>Input>Hair info. It makes the roots darker and the ends lighter.

I tried to do that, but I didn’t like the results (for some reason the render had a bugged tile, please disregard it):


Then I recalled that I previously used the ColorRamp node for a related effect directly as a color input for the hair reflection node, and so I have used it here to make the roots darker:



By the way, as you can see eventually I found that extending the model beyond the neck increases the appeal of the render significantly; I should have done this earlier. It also unexpectedly has an effect on the lighting due to bounced light.

Although it is clear that more work and detail was put in the last hair styling, I liked the originality of the first one.

I think the nose looks a hair too pinched in the center possible widening of he nostrils might be considered as well, I thought the chin juts out a smidge too as well, but otherwise great, and the hair as you know was a problem, other than that, best doll Ive seen.

Hi there!
Your doll is already awesome! You could just tweak the hair and give a pastel olive greenish background and call it a day :slight_smile:
But since you asked for ways to make it even better, there goes my tips based on what I like:

  • Add a more pronounced fresnel effect to the skin material. Very doll-like
  • The eyelids could really use some stylish blue makeup, it’s a j-doll afterall, the eyes are the soul
  • Mentioning the eyes again, try adding the caruncles, it’s a “realism detail” but j-dolls seems to have them, besides, would make the eyes even prettier
    And thats all I have to say, I guess

Wait, just one more thing, I hope you use the original style for the hair, I really loved it. Gives lots of trouble but it’s so much dollyer ^_^. You did a great job on the straight style, though.
And another thing, I don’t know if you are still having problems with the eyebrows but just to let you know, seems that hair shader works by liting a triangle and darkening the opposite triangle of a face, so, to get the effect you want you should make the eyebrows high poly, or ditch the shader and use hair particles, or draw orange lines in a texture to look like this:



But the hair shader would look so nice on the eyes iris, just try it, you won’t regret it.
Hope my tips are useful. Can’t wait to see the finished result :wink: