Hey guys, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve had been drowning in work in recent weeks (what’s great!), only being able to sneak out to work more on this project between commissions. I got quite number of small tasks done actually, but only got around to rendering things I need to show to other people.
New skin shader progress
The new shader uses procedural maps for the albedo blended through hand-painted masks. No roughness map yet, sorry. I’ve got some considerations on the viability of this method in a production environment at the end of the post.
(Albedo only)
Hair
I’m done tweaking the hair after the transfer to the skullcap. Hair styling is fun enough might have gone a bit overboard here! I hope to only revisit it once I get around doing more hairstyles for a portfolio piece or after fixing her topology—whatever comes first—, as the hair might slide a bit out of place anyway. The intersections and shitty baby hair combing are here to stay for the time being!
Key takeaways
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Image textures > Procedural textures for performance
I went through some nasty crashes before baking down the procedurals for masking, and her skin doesn’t even have all the color layers it’s supposed to have yet. For rendering nothing beats baking everything into a single albedo map.
Regarding procedurals for texturing: I like the result, the infinte combinations and how it took way less fiddling with brushes to achieve good base textures. I can see myself fully incorporating this into my regular workflow.
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Multires > Displacement
This includes bump only displacement. It’s not only better looking, displacement was pretty noisy and slow for some reason. The performance difference between a lvl 5 multires and a 4k displacement png map was absurd!
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Sculpting in Blender is great! Sculpting in Blender is awful!
I like the tools. I kinda like the interface. I wish it could handle more polys. But the real deal-breaker are the lack of layers and a way to erase the sculpt back to the base, plus the occasional horrifying undo-provoked glitch. Sculpting works well for nailing down bigger shapes or adding details to small, isolated models, but unfortunately I can’t see myself using it in production yet.
I tried really hard to find creative workarounds, but really, devoting more time trying to overcome limitations instead of actually working is just unsustainable in the long run.