Hi Blenderartists,
I am GMing a small Star Trek-themed online pen and paper role play campaign and one of the joys with that is that I get to make my own artwork for tokens and maps.
Naturally I want to make portraits of my player’s characters. But if I learnt anything in the interwebs, then that good looking characters take a lot of time, a lot of practice, or most often, both. I have neither.
Here is my current pipeline:
- Create the character as much as possible with MB-Lab
- Create some hair (I am using the old particle-based hair, have not had much time to look at the new GN-hair)
- Sculpt some clothing (Dang, I forgot to add thickness to the overall…)
- Throw a HDRi and a background at it
- Tweak the MB-Lab base material a bit (turning up normal strength / displacement looks more real me thinks)
- Render
And here is my question: What would be the first thing that comes to your mind, that would take little time but dramatically improve the render?
The aim is not necessarily photorealism, but simply some decent character artwork for visualizing a few evenings of fun.
If any of you has some experience with getting good looking shots with the MB-Lab default texture (i.e. via material tweaks) I would be especially eager to learn these, as I simply do not have the time to sculpt them from a cube, or texture paint them completely from scratch by hand.
I appreciate all of your feedback!
UPDATE 12/2023
Here is the current state, and I think it is much improved:
I basically redid everything except the basemesh. So much for “I’ve got only little time, so mediocre must suffice”. But I like the result and I learnt alot 
Combage and rank pips from Blendswap by bloknayrb
I especially like the vellus-hair:
The scalp hair is fine for the time being, but if anybody has some good tips for me how to do short curly hair, similar to Tati Gabrielle in the series “You”, I’d much appreciate it!