After a long time without using Blender for more “serious” or involved work besides sporadic hard surface modeling, I decided to make a sculpting attempt (also serving as modeling exercise) of a girl bust, inspired for the most part by (and referenced from) asian ball-jointed dolls (BJD). The aim was obtaining a cute-looking, or perhaps even beautiful, eye-pleasing character bust.
Due to hardware limitations, I had to use EEVEE for the rendering, but it turns out it could obtain great results with some tweaking.
Thumbnail for the section first:
Now the actual renders.
The model is mostly a raw sculpt, with no retopologization attempted.
The skin shader was made by texture painting the model in simple layers for the base skin color, blushing/makeup and extra lines. This roughly reflects the same process used for “blushing” asian dolls.
With just the base color of course it does not look great.
The eye shader. It looks like EEVEE contact shadows cause artifacts at a close viewing distance.
An important part is having enabled the screen space refraction in both EEVEE render properties and material properties, and having a separate transparent mesh layer for the eyes.
To make the background less boring while at the same time make the model pop up a bit, I had this shader for the world. The other color ramp is for a neutral variation of the same gradient, but it’s not actually used here:
