Amadeus Project WIP

[Duoas (Michael Thomas Greer)]

Updated (see below)

Original Post

I’ve got a short film in mind and have been studying (when I can) to learn stuff to make it happen. Most of that is currently to improve my ability to texture stuff.

I’ve gotten to a point where I’m kind of pleased with the result, so I figured I might as well start a proper WIP thread and share.

This is Kailee, the protagonist in my short.

• Kailee has two UV-maps:
  • one for the head bump map, and
  • another for everything else, which includes both head and body.
• Albedo (diffuse) is all texture map, of course.
• Bump is part procedural and part texture map.
• The freckles are procedural, with a very small B&W texture map controlling density/prominence.
• The acne is also procedural. I decided not to be too unkind to my young teenager and kept it to a minimal level. Let me know if this is just too unreal for y’all.

Obviously there is still much to do with her:

• My next step is to refine the shape of the eyelids and add some proper bump to the mapping on the eyelids and add the shiny bits between the eyeball and the eyelids and along the caruncle.
• Then on to eyelashes and vellus and ear and nose hair.
• Then to finish messing with the eyebrows and scalp hair (which I’ve begun already, but isn’t yet in any condition to share).
• Then the teeth and tongue. Boo.
• After that it’s shapekeys for facial mocap, and maybe I’ll play with wrinkles.

And if when I get overwhelmed I’ll take another break and finish up the piano. (You’ll all see that again. Once done I plan to release that so you can use it in your own projects, like I did the with the notebook.)

I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m sure enough about how I want to go about it, lol. Learning materials is hard. My goal is to make her life-like enough to look fabulous but not be creepy.

JSYK, the images above are in the default pose, without any simulation or anything, so that’s why the shirt is hovering over her shoulder.

Oh, here’s some older pics that belong here too

Here’s the first pose y’all saw of her (in my other thread when I was struggling with cloth sim collisions). This is the fixed sim version, though. I designed the shirt myself. (The shoes I snagged from blendswap and modified.)

I’m also kind of pleased with the jeans. This was the first time I baked a high(er)-res, procedurally-textured object onto a low-res, UV-textured object. I know I could model separate belt loops (and a belt), but her shirt is pretty long and I went overboard learning how to do the cool stuff to the jeans as it was, seeing as you’ll never see much of it. (I’ve even mentally added a scene to the beginning of my short film just to quickly show them off, lol.)

Well, that’s about all I’ve got for now. Please do point out anything obvious you think I ought to fix.
Thanks for viewing!

[hopefullyidont1 (Hope)]

Everything looks pretty nice so far, Lighting looks nice, geometry around the ears might need some work, I can tell this was a makehuman mesh so it might require some more manual work. I think what’s killing realism is the lack of eyelashes. Cloth geometry looks good but the jeans have a bit too uniform color.
I can’t really see bump on skin either, though this is a denoised screenshot so i can’t really judge it.

[Duoas (Michael Thomas Greer)]

Updates

Hair

Obviously the biggest update is playing with hair. Of course now that 3.5 is out I am considering redoing it, lol. I’m not sure I am entirely happy with the current ponytail. I might just use hair curves to create a more tightly-pulled back ponytail. IDK. The difference will probably be how easy it is to manage physics. At the moment physics aren’t doing nice things with the ponytail (the images above only have physics applied to the loose hair in front), and I think it is too obvious that the loose hair in the front is basically card hair (mesh to curve). I might ultimately wind up with some kind of frankenstein hair getup.

Here’s the current node tree, which is basically just the mesh-to-curve etc for each hair mesh object:

Vellus

The two closeup images above show her with vellus hair, which I was experimenting with, but I don’t think I’ve got quite right yet. The difference is a 5–10 minute render versus a 2–3 hour render with vellus… so, I don’t think I am going to mess with it much more, even though it looks better. (It took my wife and daughter a bit to be able to see the difference, and I’m not sure if that means I am doing it right or not, but I can’t say I’ve ever really noticed it on most teenagers before either, even when I was a teen.)

Eyebrows & Eyelashes

I am pleased well enough with the eyebrows and eyelashes.

• Eyebrows following Luwizart’s “Easiest Way To Create hair in Blender 3.4” tutorial (which I highly recommend, even though he makes a few blunders while speaking and I couldn’t figure out his magic snap shortcut so had to do it the long way: just turn on snap before pressing G).

• Eyelashes following the basic principles in PixelicaCG’s “How to Create Eyelashes, Clean and Fast in Blender in 4 Minutes” (Though I didn’t separate any geometry from the body mesh — no need — and I used color to manage the positional shade and thickness of lashes as well, since they aren’t uniform toward the corners of the eyes.)

Skin

The only skin I plan to mess with more is the hands, which at the moment are just the simple low-res color. I will probably do like I did with the head and create a separate UV map just so I can add proper non-procedural bump and fix the fingernails.

Top to bottom that’s acne, freckles, albedo, displacement/bump maps, procedural bump, and small and large veins. Notice that a few things depend on that one texture in the freckles frame, which turned out to be much more useful than I originally thought it would. It basically controls the prominence / density / placement and is only a 512×512 greyscale image.

The veins coloring I learned from Kammerbild’s “How I gave Suzanne human skin in Blender” tutorial (warning: this guy and his commentators have some fairly off-color commentary, jsyk). I feel a bit validated about my procedural bump too, since he does basically the same thing I did. Heh.

The most curious bit is the Group Input switch to choose between body and head uv / bump maps. That way I get a seamless blend between them at the neck, so long as I fade the bump data to only procedural at the seam. (I’ll likely have to update it to do the hands the same way.)

Fooey. More work. I’m so ready to be done with this, lol.

Next Steps

Fixing my rig’s fingers. I made a mistake not making sure the bone angles were aligned properly, so I’m getting some wonky deforms (which you can see in the images above). I may just rebuild the hands to provide more control.

@hopefullyidont1
Yeah, I wasn’t going to mess much more with the jeans, as they are mostly covered by the shirt, but since you said something I’ll play with adding some color and wear variation.

I remember when you could buy new jeans that hadn’t already been half destroyed by the factory, lol.

[Duoas (Michael Thomas Greer)]

Update to the jeans, @hopefullyidont1.

Yeah, I know, I just slapped on a Musgrave, but again, I didn’t even leave in geometry for the belt loops, since the jeans are generally obscured by the shirt.

The image is a bit post-processed between Material Preview and Render Preview, just to make sure to show the texture better. The jean material itself is procedural — only the stitches and bump are baked from a higher resolution mesh. It’d take a pretty chunk of memory to do albedo and fine bump using images, and my little-ol’ fifteen-year-old PC just can’t handle much more than what I’m throwing at it now.

For animation, I figure this ought to do. Not gonna spend much time on her butt, heh.

Feel free to correct my approach if I’m wrong.

[Nanoglyph (Lee)]

Wow, she looks so much better with hair!

I do think it could be worth exploring the new hair system, but what you have already looks pretty decent. I don’t think it looks like it’s obviously mesh to curve. The hair looks a little “perfect” (so not quite photoreal up close) but reasonably natural.You do have some nice little flyaways though.

Hair shader translucency looks a little high but that could be the lighting.

There’s really no need to spend a lot of time on areas that are covered by the shirt unless you plan to re-use the shorts with clothes that won’t be. If you were going to use these with other outfits, I’d say your musgrave needs more tweaking for the fading to look more natural (there are some tiny spots that don’t make sense), or advise painting by hand and using the musgrave or noise to mask that for procedural detail, but there’s no need since the problem areas will be covered. Adding geometry for the belt loops would just raise your polycount for no good reason, otherwise.