So I’ve been working on this the past week, and have been taking my time and learning a lot about blender through tutorials etc. I’m just about finishing up the head now, and was just wondering if I could have some feedback on the hair. I’ve been experimenting with modeling clumps of hair and then “coating” those with hair particles. This has been greatly reducing my render times, plus it gives me more control over hair movement etc. when/if I decide to rig him. Any ideas/sugguestions on how to improve what I’m doing would be highly appreciated.
A couple issues I’m dealing with:
hair “roots” appearing in the middle of my hair. This is mainly due to my AO and next render I’ll be experimenting with turning off the hair material’s shadows and see if that helps.
strange artifact above the right eyebrow. see attached image. It’s not the raytrace sampling from the lights as I’ve got it set to 16 samples each right now. It’s also not the mesh topo - this is popping up in other areas as well. Something with the shadows… i think…
any other thoughts/critique would be highly valued. I’m trying to go places with this one for my reel.
hmm… your method gives him a ‘dreadlocks’ feel… i think it would probably be better just to go with your mesh hair… other than that, your textures are looking good. a bit of tonal variation would look nice but that’s just preference. i’m not going to critique your characters proportions (i’m sure someone else will, though) as i feel that following the ‘correct’ proportions makes a character ‘bland’…
TONS of work on the hair. I tried a lot of different things, but I think this is the best result that I can expect. Still a combination of mesh and particle hair. Also thanks a lot for the comments! I made the ears more pointy and even though you can’t see it here there is a LOT more contrast in the fact.
now I should I move on to the rest of the body or should I start work on shape keys and facial animation?
Wow, that hair looks way better. It looks like you have a few alpha mapped planes in there somewhere though, and you can occasionally see the straight line of intersecting polygons. Not too much but it is there. I love the colour variations though, you’ve gone all out and it payed off. I’m not a big character modeller, but I think you should do some facial muscles before going on to the rest of the body. I like to mix up what I do throughout the model rather than doing distinct modelling texturing and rigging phases. I find that I end up having to go back and redo the other phases which is annoying because it disrupts the current phase. Better to just organically make it as you go. But that’s my workflow. I like your experimentation on the hair! Keep blending!
If this is your first character model, then I agree with the others on jumping around doing various things that suit you. At this stage in your development you probably need to move on to see how shape keys will work out. But if I were you, I wouldn’t have even started texturing or messing with particle systems until the entire model was done. Adding more vertices after shape keys have been made, is not a good idea imo.
