you’re just facing what every artist are facing when seeing peoples amazing work.
it’s a standing joke with me and my friends, as soon as you see something amazing done you hate that person, how did she/he do that?! then acceptance that you’re pretty much worthless in comparisson, and you start to understand some small pieces how it was done, and by that hopefully you learn something 
Eyes made in blender and render on blender octane.
I am new here as I come from stagnated and polarized ADSK camp(Maya and Max ~ 15 years ). I also worked fulltime with LW and C4D for a few years + know the basics of Modo and XSI. Few years ago I switched to Houdini and very recently I discovered Blender as I needed to compliment procedural workflow with some traditional modeling. I need to stress how amazed I am at how capable and mature this software is! Further more I cannot believe I did not stumble on it sooner as much like yourself I kept telling myself that surely commercial software must be superior- HARDLY (few exceptions like ZB)! If anything, after all of these softwares Blender seems like the perfect combination of strongest aspects of other leading dcc apps(e.g incredibly powerful python integration, best rendering(gpgpu), layers like lw/modo, modifiers (nondestructive worfklow like max/c4d), flexible outliner, best modeling tools and sculpt - etc, list is very long).
Said that, it never really hurts to know another program especially for professional reasons as it adds a lot of value to your resume. However you’re looking at around 5000eur investment(Base program + vray/arnold + hairfarm/yeti etc) to get the barebones base to do what you need (and what blender does on its own).
Human workflow pipeline usually revoles around very precise modeling based on photo reference, some sculpt for detailing (blender absolutely excels here) and decent texturing (e.g sss maps; irrelevant to blender). Next most complex thing is hair… I dont know about grooming and manipulation methods in Blender, but have seen relatively complex styles done here as well as realistic renders. One cool thing with ZB workflow is that it allows fibre CURVE export that max or maya can read and groom their hairsystems with(can it be done here?)
The key with other softwares is Rendering, particularly Vray or Arnold (sometimes MR). There are a lot of skinshaders floating around as well as tutorials for it… It does not mean that Cycles can’t do it. It is simply a lot harder to get realistic rendering going with this NEW TECH if you have no base/tutorials by army of other artists who have repeatedly reiterated and refined the same workflow and shaders. After all, if for some reason you cannot get result with Cycles for whatever reason you can always export it to standalone renderers as there are many to choose from.
The main issue is not tools but simply that Human face/figure is one of the most complex cg aspects to conquer - we are hardwired to spot slightest of errors in face that immediately reads as fake /UNCANNY VALLEY in our minds. It really means that modeling needs to be MAXIMUM as well as shading and rendering - it’s really hard subject. Regardless I firmly believe that you are not limited 1 bit by Blender and if anything you should take this challenge and demonstrate to others what a truly capable software this is. Infact If you wish we can undertake that challenge together as It was on my TODO list but I have held off as I am still learning Blender ( my last attempt 8 years ago (in max): http://cgstrive.com/tmp.jpg )
But, hey, if you think that other software has a ‘make my render beautiful’ button that Blender lacks, well, go for it! I’ve heard they also have a ‘clean up my animation curves’ button, too, along with instant rotoscoping from storyboard sketches. [/snark]
Perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. We would need to establish some rules though.
Like:
Needs to be animation ready
Needs to be rendered in blender cycles(or internal but I doubt we’d ever want that)
Your over simplifying my argument.
I have changed my stance a little bit after this discussion. Now I think, that blender+cycles is probably capable of doing a human that can climb its way out of the uncanny valley, however, it does take such a huge time investment that the ROI is not worth it. It is probably still more (time) efficient to use at least a different render engine.
@Gatorider, man just finished that thread, I’m speechless. Best -ever- photorealistic portrait I’ve seen. On the last page I was seriously thinking it was a reference. A funny part is someone commenting at the middle of the thread saying it comes close to studio quality. Hmmm…no? It’s far better.
Whilst it’s true that before Cycles it took a whole lot more work having to fake the GI and what not + all the work that went into gamma correction after the creation of faces/heads trough linear workflow(for lighting & shading - the actual hard part) it was definitely doable even back then(and I must admit I just glimpsed over the fact that say for an example approximate GI has in fact been added to BI as well).
You are on to something in here in that The Cycles renderer definitely cuts the amount of lighting & shading work shorter - well, why then hasn’t the amount of realistic portraits of human faces increased a hundred-fold? well as stated it takes time & a lot of work to create them, as well as a whole lot of people still need to learn the physically correct work flows, you can’t escape it just because we now have things like GI. Textures and shaders need to add up to physically correct results to look correct and fool the eye, getting proportions right is by far no small feat in and of it’s self, really. 
And sure, the user pool is still quite a bit smaller than say 3DS or Maya, or I dare claim even Lightwave, which your linked video was from, btw. And on the note of software, there may be some things @ which Lightwave may be better than blender and vice-verse however all in all I’d say the two are rather on par, really. At this point in time you probably can achieve realism with approximately the same amount of work.
I probably won’t have the patience to learn and do ultra-realistic renders of a human face. I don’t see the point. Show me a 5 minute animation of a human where you can’t detect anything but realism let alone humans in a full-lenght movie. Waste of time. I see the value for learning purposes, but making it a be all and end all, I don’t think so. I’m satisfied with likeness or resemblances even without textures.
sculpted in Blender’s Dyntopo…
This comes pretty close to photoreal in cycles. But, you’ll notice that all the examples are with scans.
I think the limiting factor is almost always time & effort, not tools, today.
I would guess things would go much faster in terms of animation, if you switched to another package that had a better facial animation workflow, but I dunno about animation generally.
But the process of putting in all the fine details into the mesh and the textures… other packages might help with the texturing, but they aren’t Max or Maya… they’re painting apps. And as far as making and tweaking the shaders, well… since there are some skin shaders already done for Cycles as well as other apps, they are close in that regard.
I tend to agree, unless you already have a fast workflow in some other software, or you’re planning really extensive animations, there is no free lunch.
Blender’s grooming tools are some the best I’ve used in a commercially available package. It beats the pants off of grooming in Maya or Shave and a haircut (I hear Yeti rocks). I’ve also successfully exported my groomed hair curves to maya for use with nhair. With the new additions coming to hair dynamics for gooseberry, I look forward to being able to keep my hair sims in blender, which will pretty much make blender a competitive and complete end-to-end solution for hair grooming, dynamics and rendering.
Also, concerning the work by Chris Jones, he does most of his work in Lightwave, which is one of the oldest 3d packages available on the market, widely considered (by those that don’t use it) to be outdated and inferior to maya. The LW community is rife with people whinning and complaining that LW is doomed and outdated and that they should all move to maya. Yet Chris Jones never complains at all. He just makes stuff with his “outdated” software.
Blender is FULLY capable of rendering and animating photoreal humans. At least as far as any one single artist can deliver anyway.
Did you know that Maya can’t deliver Avatar quality results either? Avatar’s pipeline is so enhanced with custom tools that maya is almost unrecognizable there. Custom tools, custom sims, custom renderers, performance capture with custom tools written to deal with the data, and so on. An individual artist outside Weta’s walls will never have access to those tools, so why do people consistently think that they could make avatar if they just used maya?
The idea that one piece of software is more suitable than another for creating photoreal humans is a complete red herring.
The uncanny valley has not yet been successfully crossed. Avatar for example, gets around it by representing non-human characters. Hollywood superhero movies use digital doubles only for fast moving action scenes.
So I guess my point is- if the cutting edge can’t do it yet, then don’t sweat it. Fire up Blender and do your best work.
All modern 3d programs are very capable and Blender is no exception in this regard. Therefore in my opinion the ownness is on the artist to work with the pros and cons of their chosen package and produce work of a sufficient quality to be considered realistic by others.
You have some solid work in your portfolio and I find it surprising you have this absurd (to put it very mildly) mindset.
It’s the artist, not the tools (this has to be one of the most tired phrases here on BA, but it is true, nonetheless).
It is your lack of skills and expertise that is holding you back, not the software package.
Hi,
Just thought i’d big up sketchup a bit here. It may of been used in the creation of Avatar
Although, it may be B.S lol.
http://www.sketchup-ur-space.com/march11/SketchUp-in-the-making-of-AVATAR.htm
I appreciate the shout out!
Indeed, materials and rendering are the EASY part of photoreal rendering. Which is saying something, because neither is particularly easy at all.
Scans take a LOT of the grunt work out of modeling and texturing, but even then you’re left with a static, pretty looking bust. Realism comes from meshing every school of 3D into one product. As others have pointed out, I’ve seen it done well maybe 3 or 4 times in my entire 3d career.
Photoreal humans are not a light undertaking. In ANY 3D package. Certainly no more so in Maya or 3DS than in Blender. It comes down to time, and a great deal of patience to sit looking at a single model and animation and material for weeks or months on end until you get that 3-10 second shot that finally looks right. And I’d gladly wager that that “work time” is the same regardless of where you chose to do it.
^ indeed. Think about how many genuinely convincing photoreal humans you’ve seen reproduced with any medium except photography. I can’t think of many… like 2 or 3 in CG and maybe a couple in oil paint. The problem is our brains are super-finely-tuned to recognize anything interesting, unusual, or wrong about another person’s face. So this is quite possibly the hardest subject to fool the eye with. For, say… robots… the uncanny valley is long past. But for humans, the bridge across is very, very slippery…
