Here’s a character I’m working on, plan to use him in a pre-rendered CGI scene in a game. I intentionally sculpted him to be stylized, sort of like Tekken5/FF12 style. Mid 2000s CGI character. The game model will be a less detailed version of this. Hair is tricky, I’m not enjoying it at all. It’s work in progress, I’ll have to add smaller patches close to the hairline and close the gaps and generally improve it.
But I’m content with the eyebrows, or eyebrow. It’s not perfect but I’m not going to play with individual hairs for hours. I mirrored the left eyebrow to the right side. But look in the image, it seems like the normals are inverted or something is off. The left side is lighter but the eyebrow is darker, the right side is darker but the eyebrow is lighter. The right eye also looks odd, like it’s lighter than it’s supposed to be. Maybe there’s some toggle in the eeve render settings or the normals on the curves have been inverted or something.
I’m not sure how to fix it.
How to get the most out of eeve and shaders.
For the lighting, do you have a light source with a big radius? I am seeing lots of noise in the shadow and it makes me think that could be the case. The softer the shadows are, the harder they are to render properly in Eevee.
Shadows this soft will give you light leaks and noise and won’t properly be soft with the default settings.
If this is what’s happening, the easiest way to fix it is to use a smaller light source which Eevee can simulate easier.
But if you do need a large light source with soft shadows, there are ways, it’s just more expensive to render. The first thing you could try is to increase the shadow steps in the main render settings.
This will help the softness and reduce the light leaks, but there is a maximum of 16, so this setting only goes so far. If you want to render a truly massive light source in Eevee, you need to use jittered shadows. You can activate them on the light itself, and there is also a checkbox in the render settings if you want to see the effect in the viewport.
Jittered shadows work by stacking a bunch of random sharp shadows on top of each other until they add up to something smooth.
This looks bad at low samples, but with enough quality, it can render beautiful shadows. If the light source is very wide, it can take hundreds of samples, so I would use this only if truly necessary and only for the most important lights.
For the hair, I think the main problem is that it doesn’t have any visible shadow on the skin. That might be the same problem I just explained though, light leaks caused by massive radius and soft shadows.
I do have an other thought. Maybe it would look better if the skin’s texture was a bit darker where the hair is?
What a great reply, with images and anything. You’re right, I put the sun light source at a high angle because soft shadows looked better. After lowering it now the eyebrow and eye looks like they’re properly in shadow. Good to know there are ways to prevent it too by tinkering with the render settings. I didn’t consider the angle on the sun or light sources at all. Thanks a lot!
