Here’s a quick test I did to try my hand at animation in Blender. I know the actual animation is pretty terrible but it was still a fun learning exercise. Spent a lot of time trying to get decent settings to animate the clothes and hair… still a ways to go. This is 100% EEVEE by the way – which was great because the whole scene (80 frames) was rendered in less than 20 minutes.
The niche that you’ve found is quite appreciated. Nice to see you take these “Mundanes” to the next level. Keep working on this stuff! It’s nice to have something different. And EEVEE nonetheless… WOW.
Unreal. Must see live stream of this being done in full. 
clothes are crazy light but good start! look is good.
"It’s the little things," indeed the very mundane things, which really make this work: a flip of the hand, a little smile. Slight movements of “the things that aren’t moving.”
This is what reveals what you’re really doing: “you’re taking footage of an actual girl, and passing it off as 3D animation!” 
The only thing that I notice is that “the girl would probably raise her arm even slightly faster,” and probably not quite so “evenly.”
So here, you kind of see that the clothes aren’t real, that the movement of the face is kind of robotic (it has a feel like these real time phone videos with overlaid glasses or cat ears).
But that could be some kind of compositing similar to what Ian Hubert showcased. With a mannequin on top to overlay hair, clothes and face.
What I also notice which could confim it, is the thing that looks like a “static stain” overlaying the crotch area, we can clearly see that there’s is something overlaid there
But also, the wrist that is lifted up then down has really an awkward unnatural twist to it when it’s back down.
In any way, real render or compositing thing, it still is great work.
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Your works is almost peak of mastery, because there is always something to strive for. I also work in a blender, but I have never been able to make a similar result with the skin. Can you show me what the skin node settings look like? I understand that this is a secret most likely, but maybe you can show them from afar, that you couldn’t see everything, but you could roughly see something there. I just looked for video tutorials about the skin and didn’t find any good ones. If the answer is no, I just wish you success in your development!
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Thanks. My skin shader node tree is actually very basic (see below). No special sauce there. Key is to have high-quality textures and lighting and composition. My textures start with Victoria 8.1 textures from Daz then I modify them to my liking. These are great ones to start with as DAZ uses TexturingXYZ for their 8.1 characters. Hope this helps.
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I just wanted to add a note of praise as well. Your work is absolutely terrific! Truly inspiring.
And I agree with Fanzarion and others, please do a tutorial? Seeing your lessons-learned process in action would still be greatly appreciated.
Can’t wait to see what you do with a daylight setup!
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Wait, you just feed the original image into a gamma and then use that for the subsurface? It looks fine, although i never would have thought of that. I guess the real secret is in the style itself. Most people make the human renders under perfect conditions, perfect lighting, perfect camera and focus. You make your images just like a plain selfie someone snapped. You don’t need to make it perfect, because the photo was not perfect in the first place. Makes me wonder how realistic the world actually is. When people make realistic renders, they always exaggerate the features.
On a side note, I found the motion blur looked too extreme and kinda choppy.
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Also, I noticed a small error. At about 4 seconds into the animation, part of her armpit collides with the clothing. Maybe tweak the weight painting on her shirt?
The body is so real, the animation test looks like you took a real life model and added CG on top of her. Even the quick little animation is keyed perfectly to be absolutely realistic. It’s like you’re blending a real model with a CG model and mixing them.
I love this work. Instead of showing us tests and shader nodes, why not spend one day creating a tutorial with very little editing, showcasing how you do all this start to finish. I’d love to see how you build it all up and make it look photo real. Thanks!
As @Slartibartfast and many others mentioned, a tutorial would be much appreciated. Maybe you could get on CGcookie. That would be awesome.
Yeh I dont use a separate subsurface map unless it’s really needed because it’s just another 4k resource that eats up precious video/GPU RAM and really isn’t needed in most cases.
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Thank you so much! I else have some questions, but I need to have a conscience, because you have come a long way to improve your skills and others should do it too. I wish you all the best!