I am sculpting a female portrait rendering it in Cycles. I decided to concentrate on the face texture this time, and skip hair until Cycles support it. I still want to achieve a decent level of a photorealism so she is going to wear some kind of a hat just because I am cheating
I am posting my progress so far, and would love to get ideas about what works, what does not, and what needs to be improved. I consider face to be close to copletion, hat is very much in progress, and I did not even start yet to work on the neck down.
Very nice! Lots of little details like the wispy hair above the ear and the “real” skin with little blemishes make it warm. She does not appear model made up. The hat seems a bit too white or stiff or something, I am not quite sure. Maybe warm or cool it’s hue a bit?? She has a nice, intense expression, like she’s about to go kick some butt on the tennis court!
Ooops, I should learn to read - saw the part about the hat not having been worked on much yet after hitting the old “post” button! I wanted to clarify my comment about the not being model “made-up” as a good thing. Makes her look still beautiful, but human and real if that makes sense. Too often the skin looks so perfect as to look plastic.
I followed approach suggested by Greg Zaal http://www.blendernerd.com/sss-cycles/ which seemed to work really well. In a nutshell – I added a ‘skull + neck muscles’ object inside of the skin and mixed in a translucent shader
You can see the crude ‘skull and neck’ I used here – they block translucency of the back light so ‘sss’ affects ears, nose, lips and eye sockets the most. I outlined ‘sss’ relevant nodes with a white line.
atlpaddler, thank you for your suggestions, you are right about light being too uniform – I have to fix that. I am still not sure I want to go with the tennis theme by adding a tennis cap, a fragment of a racquet, etc. I already increased amount of sweat on the face, to go with the ‘sporty’ environment
Not sure if it’s just the lighting, but to me there appears to be a slight problem just below the naso-labial fold. In the render there appears to be a very slight ridge there. I notice in your wireframe that there is an edge connecting two poles in that location. Perhaps it needs to be very slightly smoother. Great work on the hat textures.
mesh is rather simple, the stitches and ‘cloth’ are bump maps, color and glossy/diffuse masks