Thanks keseyrage! Thanks Bart! 
Thanks marcaroni!
Overwhelmingly positive so far.
That being said, I’ve been having some trouble with the next update, which is unearthing more issues the more I try to bury them. Mind you I still have my Blender training wheels on, so it could be that I’m just doing it wrong. Stay tuned!
(c:
OMG I’m a big fan of your work! I love to see your progress in bringing it to Blender! Keep it up!
I agree that it is slightly waxy. (but really slightly)
The more creepy it looks with those hollow eyes.
Like you were preparing the cyborg human 2.0 to replace us all 
Jaw dropping detail.
Blender community just can’t seem to get enough of this kind of “conversions”
PS. maybe make him even more “blendery” adding a blender logo tatoo on the naeck or sth 
Jarek D(DJ)
Thanks Tonatiuh & garagefarm!
Still not happy with this, but I need to move on.
The main challenges were the same as with the LW version, namely achieving a smooth sclera/cornea transition which illuminates when catching the light, accompanied by sharp caustics. I couldn’t get anything useful out of the caustics (ultimately I had to abandon them in LW as well), and the transition is prone to noisy artefacts, which isn’t helped by a shadow being cast by the cornea that shouldn’t really be there.
I’d have preferred using the Translucent BSDF on the sclera instead of the cornea, but strangely that made the bumps appear inverted at the terminator. Otherwise that would have been a more elegant solution than the one I arrived at:
Any way to slow that .gif down to its native 24fps by the way? It’s playing so fast here that it’s dropping frames.
Holy guacamole!
Jaw dropping.
I remember seeing your vids way back (actually could be, the first time I heard of tension maps was in your demo), we were all super inspired seeing it in the studio I worked in at the time.
Great to see such a high profile exile here 
Looking forward to see more of your stuff here.
Thanks 0rAngE, fingers crossed I can get the tension maps working here as well.
Eyeball safely back in socket:
I plan to regrow the brows and lashes using hair particles, though the mesh ones don’t look too terrible here. I had another crack at improving the eyeball (couldn’t leave it alone), and not only did I manage to remove the offending corneal shadow and simplify the sclera/cornea blend, but in the process I eliminated a whopping 11 nodes!
Conversely I had to add a few more to the skin material since Random Walk was insistent on the caruncle being dark maroon with a hard black edge, so I gave in after a couple of days wrestling with it and blended the SSS into another SSS with different settings. It’s an extra bit of complexity I was trying to avoid, but I need to move on… 
Lovely work! I use Lightwave too but I’m loving what can be done with Blender. I think I might jump ship! Very inspiring work! 
Thanks Adam (there sure are a lot of Lightwavers here…).
I loved Using Lightwave but Newtek dropped the ball with their development. Blender seems to be more on the ball than Newtek.
Holy cow, so cool to see your work on this forum!
Big fan here, I remember watching The Passenger and reading the blog about the production process several times. I’m still amazed by the quality you achieved at the time. (How about a remastered version? 
)
Can’t wait to see more of your work here, cheers!
absolutely mindblowing, even after all those years
Could you possibly show the skin shader nodes? Of course if its not a secret Its good to learn from the best.) I was into Lightwave when it was on Amiga. 1994 or 1995 - something like that. Can you imagine?
I know that you’re continuing to develop this; trying to make it better and better. But with what you’ve got so far, you could put together a training dvd of your texture, displacement, and animation techniques and it would sell. I’d buy one for sure. Thanks.
Thanks all,
I’d have to re-render and redo all the post to make any real gains over the DVD, and the thought of that sends me into PTSD spasms…
I can actually, as I also started using it in 1995 (on PC). So that makes us both old-timers!
Theoretically yes, if I could devise a practical way of doing it without having to front up to a microphone…
Hehe I can imagine, the amount of work, time and effort needed could be better spent on a new piece
All I can say this is amazing. 11/10
Thanks @P3rtan 
Two and a half weeks ago I did not know how to rig in Blender.
Today I finished rigging this from scratch:
Well not exactly finished, but all the main functionality is in place. I was expecting this to take months! It’s pretty much a replica of my original LW rig, but with spine and neck upgraded to IK - so now the whole body is IK (except for the toes, since that would be overkill this early in the game).
So that’s the scariest part of the process over with… I’ll probably make some demos of it in motion next - or maybe I’ll wait until I’ve covered the Animation chapter in the manual first.
Ok - perhaps not quite ready for crane kicks just yet… 
The rigging looks great. Something I haven’t tackled yet. Look forward to seeing more of this!
That’s really amazing Chris. I think you’ll find that adding attachments (clothing, hair, etc.) is really straight forward with Blender (don’t know how 2.8 works yet), and Blender has a built-in system for copying vertex groups and weight maps to other objects. There are also a few free addons for copying and working with shapekeys.
In my LW days, I never would have been able to fully complete any of my characters in the same amount of time that I do with Blender, which is the main reason why I switched.
Yeah I’m pretty surprised how quickly and relatively hassle-free this is coming together.
I tried out the hair system some time ago (and there’s some vellus in the first render), so I’m somewhat confident about furnishing him with some locks. If cloth is as easy as you say then the main remaining foreseeable hurdles are tension maps and non-linear shape key transitions, so if I can get those working I’ll be home and hosed.
