This has really gotten buried in the flood of WIPs, so I hope you folks don’t mind if I bump it for a shot at some C&C as we approach the end game for the Blending Life event. Image in post#59 (last one above) is the most current and prime candidate for submission. Thanks!
That’s so freakin’ awesome. There is one little thing that catches my attention, I’m certainly not an anatomy expert, and I don’t know that I’ve seen anybody at quite that angle, but the right arm seems small to me. is that the latissimus dorsi in the back, and the tricep at the bottom of the arm? It’s probably accurate, but for some reason it looks odd. just me 2 cents.
Great work Chipmasque.
One crit I would have is the specular highlights on the eyes. They seem to stop abruptly at the edges of the iris, which makes them look a bit stuck on. I think the highlight should continue over the sclera (the white of the eye) as well. That would be closer to how the highlights behave in real life.
Hey man, I got a idea for you, to improve the realism of this guy.
Try adding tiny hairs over the body, (they dont have to be very visible) Like shown in this tutorial, (page 2 I think)
Wow this is very nice, I really like it, the skin and all the details, keep up the good work man…
Greets llx66
Thanks for all the good feedback, folks, it’s appreciated.
@ scdelf – These screencaps from the UI show why the FG arm appears thinner than it might if it was in a different position:
The red arrow is the approximate view angle through the arm – because the implied arm position is with the elbows on the rope with hands hanging down, the camera sees pretty much only the bicep. The other views show that the triceps are there, but are hidden by camera angle and the closeness of that arm to the camera. A wider view might have made this more apparent, but I wanted to focus on the portrait aspect, keeping things tight on the face.
@ futar – I think most of the effect you mention in the eye highlights is caused by the placement of the lights that are reflected, but also some by the way Blender seems to deal with speculars, and the shape of the eye model. It has a corneal bump, so the place where the curve changes affects the highlight some, in this case, a small crescent-shaped highlght. Also, the eyeball portion is kicking in a bit of specular as well, but I couldn’t completely eliminate that without also screwing the rest of the eyeball shader:
The eye at pic right has both hardness and specular turned way down, but with the additive AO it comes off looking very weird (could not use Subtractive or Both for AO – see the post above about the eyes). Killing the specular didn’t look much better, either. The highlight does seem to end right at the iris edge but that’s sort of an accidental – the more diffuse highlight (removed for that test above – see the eye on the left) is caused by a low-value hemi at camera position that I use for a small amount of fill (which I think works better than upping the ambient), but Blender creates reflections of lights that sometimes seems to be out of proportion to the brightness and size of the lamp being reflected. I can’ t angle the lamp (and thus move the highlight) enough to make a significant position change without also making it useless as a fill. But the eye without that diffuse highlight looks much less natural imo. Somewhat of a trade-off, perhaps, but an acceptable one. If retouch wasn’t restricted, I’d likely re-shape that highlight somewhat in Photoshop to adjust things along the lines you suggest, but I did want to keep it all native Blender.
I’ve also experimented with using reflections of items actually in the scene, but can never get them looking right, they always seem to look out of place to me.
@ Lasphere – Given how much struggle it was to get the current body hair looking OK, I think I’ll pass on this suggestion. Also, there doesn’t seem to be any need for it, and adding it might actually have a negative effect, passing what I think of as the TMI limit (Too Much Information!). I don’t thinks it’s always necessary to include absolutely every possible detail of human anatomy and structure in order to achieve both naturalistic and “realistic” imagery. My favorite 2D portraitists have a great appreciation of what NOT to render/paint/draw. With 3D, adding every possible bell and whistle can sometimes overload the viewer with detail to the point where the image becomes obviously CGI, and falls into the Uncanny Valley. Human perception can be very selective, and usually is most of the time, suppressing awareness of a lot of detail in order to focus on what’s important at the moment. I try and bring that into renderings as well, which sometimes means choosing to not put in certain details.
BTW, that tutorial is very nice, lots of good tips, but imo the result, as well done as it is, looks very obviously CGI to me – I think it suffers a bit from TMI.
@ llx66 – Thank you, sir!
I saw the last render of the full scene. It looks tremendous!! congratulations
I figured it was probably the angle, because your other shot doesn’t look odd at all. Keep up the awe inspiring work. 
Thanks again for your kind comments, blenderfriends 
! I definitely took all the C&C into account, and took a along hard look at the previous “final,” decided a few subtle tweaks were in order:
You’d probably have to know where to look to see the revisions – some additional eye reflections (I created a mocked-up environment and rendered out three separate passes of the cornea that I then combined with the full image to various degrees in the Compositor), and a touch of additional skin texture in some areas where the lighting seemed to flatten out the normal map effect too much (required a re-render of the figure with a “cut-down” mesh – pretty much face only – and a second TS normal map with much higher relief, again masked and melded in the Compositor).
This will be my “placeholder” image – the actual that I’ll submit is 1266x937 (image area less label strip).
Stunning work. I like the attention to details everywhere. This will be “tough to beat”.
(shakes fist in anger), damn you set the bar high, congrats and good luck for the judging am sure this will place very well one of my favorites thus far.
Good job, looks fantastic.
Stunning, congrats on a fantastic final.
Brilliant job!
Unfortunately I have to say that those eyes don’t look right, they aren’t wet enough. They look like his eyeballs dried out sometime during the fight.
alter the specularity under his left eye , make it less
very cool modeling and overall .