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I’m starting a new character model now that I finally have time to work on a new project. Right now it’s a dyntopo sculpture, and I think it’s ready for retopology.
Comments and criticism are welcome!
Update: finished the retopology.
I reshaped the top and back of the head, and (maybe) fixed the proportions.
Next up: break up the symmetry and start sculpting details.
Great work.
I can’t wait to see the finished version.
cheers
Thats a really great model. What do you plan to do? Realistic Skin with particle hair? or will the hair be stylized?
Those eyes make the model. It almost looks like you painted a real woman in grey. Nice work. Color me inspired.
Thanks, everyone!
I plan to make it as realistic as I can. I’ll eventually make particle hair for it, much as I don’t like grooming hair.
As for the eyes, the shaders are doing all the hard work. The only image texture right now is the iris color, everything else is just simple temporary procedural textures.
Been so long, etc.
The detail sculpting is, well, maybe not finished, but good enough. Here’s the result, baked to a 1k displacement map and 4k normal map:
Now, on to wrestle with Blender’s hair system, yay.
Awesome work man!
Well. I started this project in 2.79 and had planned on moving it over to 2.80 once I’d baked the textures (since Cycles lacks displacement baking). But after trying to add the “peach fuzz” hair, I had to give up on 2.80. Particle edit mode on this mesh (about 6.5k quads) is so slow it’s unusable. The scalp, eyebrow, and eyelash emitters are already separate objects, but it seems absurd to have to chop up the rest of the mesh to get decent performance in 2.80, when it works just fine in 2.79.
First try at braids:
I used the HairNet plugin to make the braids themselves from curve objects, and then made multiple hair systems on the scalp: the main mass of hair feeding into the braids, extra hair on the hairline and part, loose strands along the hairline, and flyaway strands.
The back of the head is still a mess and I’m not yet happy with the hairline, but I’m tired of working on hair. Maybe I’ll come back to it later. I’m going to paint the skin textures now.
please tell how you did it. very nice work man
This is really some great work. The physical detail is top notch.
That’s some mighty impressive Blender hair! Would love and see a little more about how you approached it.
Nice, it’s time for texturing now.
yest show us how you do it! it’s very impressive!
amazing work, super realistic
excellent, the hairnet plugin do some miracles, futhermore the model is highly realistic…
Alright, I had some time over the holidays to write up how I did this.
I started with Nazar Noschenko’s excellent braid tutorial: Puma (braid tutorial)
(Seriously, watch that first!)
I made a change to his braid shape by subdividing the outer segments (where they cross the x-axis) and scaling the other control points inward along the x-axis, to give it more roundness. This is probably easiest to understand by looking at the top view:
But when I tried a test render, the highlights on the braid didn’t look right. I realized the problem was the lack of twisting in the child hairs. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use a curve to define the twist, since the hair needs to twist back and forth and the twist curve ignores negative values.
The solution is to use the curve bevel and tilt to create multiple curves that twist around the original and follow the taper. I used this as the starting point for the tilt (top view again): 
then I manually adjusted the tilt (with wire display turned on) until it looked right:
Here’s the workflow to make the new curves:
Duplicate the braid curve object in place, so you don’t lose the original.
Divide the bevel depth by 2 and set the bevel resolution to 1 (six curves is enough to make it look round).
In edit mode, select all the splines and set the spline type to poly.
In object mode, convert the curve to a mesh.
Back in edit mode, select all the closed edge loops (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+select a row of edge rings on each of the three braid parts, then Select->Select Loops->Edge Loops from the menu bar).
Delete Only Edges & Faces, so only the longitudinal edges remain.
Convert back into a curve object.
Set the spline type to NURBS.
In the Active Spline panel, check Endpoint U and change Order U to 5 (this has to be repeated for each of the 18 splines).
Then I set the U resolution to 2 and used HairNet to create the braid hair systems, as described in the tutorial above.
The main hair system uses interpolated children to fill out the scalp and feed into the braids:
Even with clumping and parting turned all the way up, I had to add more parent strands than I expected to keep the children from spreading too much at the ends. I also had a strange problem with child strands not clumping with the nearest parent, and had to add even more parent strands along the part to try to overcome it. It’s still not yet fixed on the back of the head.
I used a system of simple children with clumping for the loose long hair on the hairline and to fill in the part:
The flyaway hairs are a duplicate of the main hair and braid systems, with more randomness and far fewer children.
I added one last system of short interpolated hair along the hairline to make a sort of transition from peach fuzz to long hair:
I’ll have to redo the braids when I pose the head for the final image, but that’s not too much trouble for a single picture.
So good! Glad my tutorial helped!
Looking good! A real portrait! I actually like the tints you have used in the image. It gives it a special atmosphere. Be careful not to make this portrait too realistic. It might reduce its portrait qualities.
