Its two years since I worked on a female portrait then another a year later; its time I had another go. MakeHuman has improved dramatically and so has Blender and LuxRender. I’ll see if I can do a little better this time.
Basic MH manipulation was carried out to give a suitable model then exported into Blender via MHX. The eyebrows and eyelashes were removed and replaced with meshes from my old model. We’ll see about the eyes later. I’ll keep the stock MH hair for now and try and work on the various key features of the model - eyes, hair, skin.
First thing, line up those eyelashes. If you are going to keep the mesh hair, texture them as described in this tut: http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html and then subsurf the planes or something. Lose that blocky look, and make sur you get some transparent shadows.
Maybe the texture from MH is technically accurate on the lips, but it’s not very attractive, I would even out the line of the bottom lip.
Seperate the eyes if they are not already, and give them a track to constraint on the camera. It’s odd when 3d models stare off into space.
Besides that concentrate on good lighting, and get some HDRI reflections going on the eyes.
Understood what you’ve said 3d’ and I’ve checked out the hair tutorial thanks. I’d already started working on the hair and I’m still deciding between particles or normalized meshes. We’ll see.
I will probably use some of my old eye models instead of the usual MH ones to enhance the realism a little. Lighting as you said is important but I’ll only work on that when I’ve got MH 1.0 Alpha x, LuxRender 0.7x, LuxBlend xxx and Blender 2.5x to work together. (Head posture, eye direction and liveliness, skin SSS and others of course will also be developed). No image this time; no visible progress.
I’ve managed to get a MakeHuman nightly/Blender 2.54/LuxBlend nightly/LuxRender 0.7.1 combination working. The LuxRendered image is currently nowhere near as good as I get with Blender internal render because I’m still trying to understand LuxR material handling - and then I can eventually move on to much better qualities.
Todo list:
hair, more mesh, smooth, UV and transparent textures
eyes, better gaze (get some life in it), add textures
wet eyelid edges
fix eyelashes
shape eyebrows
skin texture, (don’t think SSS possible in Lux?)
expose, texture and randomise teeth
improved stance (get some life in it)
better lighting
add spectacles
subsurf, especially ears
LuxRender may not be the best choice. As far as I know it doesn’t currently feature a SSS Material. There are some methods for faking it explored on the Lux forums, however.
Or if you are feeling adventurous Indigo supports SSS.
Thanks organic, LuxRender has been parked for the time being because of material problems but will probably be used in the final model as a personal preference. So Blender SSS is being used for practically all objects on the model; I’ll probably back off when more time has been spent on the textures.
A little progress has been made with the model and I now know how to edit the posed MakeHuman import (Modifiers/Armature Modifier/Cube/Triangle/Apply).
Entities have been added and some existing objects manipulated and some textures modified. The method seems to be to “twiddle” each feature in turn and make slow progress. Notes are being made to improve all the features in time - such as adding skin creases, bumps and specularity. The to-do list still stands and a lot of work has yet to be done to get this portrait looking at least half-human.
