R&D: Making Faces (Patreon)

I've been spending a bit of time trying to develop my character creation abilities.  This ranges from material creation and texturing to modelling and hair simulation.  In this post I'll give a broad outline of my process and use of Blender and Substance Painter.

Skin:

Skin is tricky, whether it's rasterized or ray-traced.  I'm still far from a good formula in Blender's Cycles renderer, but I've upgraded quite a bit compared to my crappy Principled skin shader.  A lot of work can go into these materials, I'm barely starting to understand them as it is, so I'll keep experimenting.

I found a couple node trees online and put something together that I could both understand and render quickly.  I changed a couple things around and came up with this:

Yeah it's pretty ugly but it works for now.  I'm considering working specular and sub surface maps into it in the future, but the more textures there are the more expensive it's going to be on render times.  One thing I'd like to do is get more red from intense light with the subsurface without disrupting the natural color of the skin, but I'm not sure how to work that in just yet.

Hair:

I was expecting hair to be super difficult, but it turns out that Blender has a pretty robust system for dealing with.  They have combs and everything!  I suck at hair styling and I was still able to come up with some passable looks.

The particle generator has tons of settings for hair and particle editing is one of the easier tools I've interfaced with in Blender.  It's really easy to style it, edit it, and give it the right look with materials.  I haven't even dug into the complex tools yet and it's still better than those damn mesh-based hair cards I've been using for so long.  Built in physics, mesh collisions, the works.  Awesome.

Substance Painter:

So this was a big leap for me because I honestly never thought I'd end up using the program.  It turns out that it's super helpful, even when you're just working with humans.  I spent some time reading guides and watching tutorials, enough for me to get a handle on the program.  Since this program is much like Photoshop, and I know that program well, I was able to pick up fast.

I think one of the biggest assets of Painter is it's variety of brushes.  It's so easy to add color to a model's face without making it look like trash if you have the right brushes.  I was afraid that since I'm no good at 2D, I wouldn't be able to do any texturing work, but I ended up doing well enough.

Texturing normal/bump/height maps is definitely a big draw too.  Since Painter has real-time previews it's really easy to understand what effect you're having on the model.

My only complaints with the program were some performance and convenience things.  Loading up a bunch of 4K textures onto a model can start to break it if it has a lot of parts.  I ended up getting weird colored checker-patterns and glitches with the textures, but couldn't find anything online other than the typical 'update your drivers'.  There are also some aspects of texture management that the program does kind of awkwardly.  The default option of loading your textures into the current session (not the file, just the current session) was among the ones that stuck out.

Aside from that, I had a lot of fun with the program.  It makes me want to try it out on non-organic materials to see what I come up with.

Character Creation:

I tested out a lot of these concepts by trying to make a DAZ-based character that doesn't look like trash and I'm actually pretty happy with how it came out.  There's plenty of room for improvement, but rarely do I ever feel like I've created something close to what I had in my head when making a character.  This might be the first time I came close, which is really cool.

Here's a fun gif of all the passes the character went through in Blender:

That's all I've got on this subject for now.  If you made it to the end, congratulations!