New blender user here, could use some helpful critiques and hints.
This is my 3rd model with blender, 1st human, but I’ve been an artist for over 25 years just new to this whole cg thing.
Just working my way through tutorials linking up what i can
I started with a guitar, then car, this is from the blenderella dvd
The hair is from the CG cookie styling and rendering long hair series and the hair shader was snippets of others mixed with trial and error. Only 80 samples my main cpu died and doing this on a tablet. I think I’m going in the right direction with the hair.
The Blendarella tutorials are a bit out-dated you know. I mean, their great and all, but I’d say most 3d work revolves around sculpting and retopo, rather then box modeling- it’s a valid technique, but I’d say a lot more time consuming. For making materials and texturing I can recommend substance designer or substance painter- way more intuitive to work with, almost like photoshop for 3d.
On Poliigon web site you can get alot of great textures and also some great tutorials.
One other thing, are you rendering on CPU or a GPU ?
CPU my main PC took a crapper, I think its the motherboard. Doing this on a tablet.
Found the Blenderella tutorials on youtube. Looked like a good way to start the learning process. It helped to learn the hot keys and modifiers for future projects. Most of the sculpting vids are time lapse and I like the idea of seeing through the mesh to line everything up.
Can you still do sculpting with this once all the modifiers are done? that was my plan for adding more detail in the face for better realism.
I downloaded Mari and started learning that for textures. Need to learn lighting first.
Still need more work on the hair a bit wild. Maybe less parents and more children ?
Skin not too bad for a start need more variation and pores.
Learning as I go, not too bad
I really need particle eyebrows and lashes.
getting weird light on the skin in a few angles (ears, nose and forehead).
Maybe the fresnel?
still trying to find the best means to reproduce pores.
Could I make a displacement map with what I have, then projection paint more details on top of that?
Or would copying an AO map and painting on that work too?
Only 250 samples so it may not make a difference on this PC.
Finally got that eureka moment .
Made a displacement map by converting the colored skin texture to greyscale and combining that with an AO map in photoshop making the greyed skin semi transparent.
Then put them back into blender and used a greyed skin texture as both a texture paint image and mask on top.
I understand your situation. My laptop won’t even run the newest version of Blender anymore. (2.75 is my ver.)
I learned a very important lesson about changing motherboards, though. Little copper screws that mount it to the case are designed to prevent grounding. Using all of them is very important because a heavy video card can…end your existence as a PC enthusiast.
In any case, when working on shaders is important to know that sometimes your performance is going to take a serious hit if you’ve got a bunch of nodes you don’t need…or if you try to force a node to do something it isn’t designed to do.
Also: closing the preview panel in the material settings tab will help…unless you’re using it…
