Character Showcase: Maev (Patreon)

It's been about a year since I started experimenting with creating my own characters. I'm really happy to finally be in a position where I feel comfortable showcasing one of them. Hopefully I'll get the other characters I've started finished up in the next few months so I can go through their development process as well.

Before and after from about mid-way through development to now:

Shaders

Maev has been subject to all sorts of skin tech experiments as I got into the field.

I must have went through a dozen different shader options before I came to two main options in the end.  There's the most accurate, but most expensive method which involves a couple simple nodes and diffuse, normal, bump, and specular textures, and a principled BSDF.  It's difficult to preview and performs poorly at a low sample rate, but the range of options and ease of manipulation make it the best choice when you can afford it.  After a lot of experimenting, I honestly don't think I'd ever use the principled shader for anything other than characters.  It's way too expensive.

My second option was a custom material built from an array of subsurface and glossy shaders and diffuse, normal, and bump textures.  It renders fast and performs well with low samples but it's lacking the extra 10% that the principled shader brings.  Surfaces often end up looking too hard with a little too much gloss.  It's also difficult to customize and lacks critical and difficult to replicate features like clear coating.

Here's a comparison:

Textures

You'd think texturing would be the most mind-numbing aspect of character creation, but it was pretty interesting.  I've always wondered of the subtleties that separate a game or film ready asset and what came stock-standard in something like a DAZ release.  I cam across several interesting differences that separate a fully developed character and a stock one.

90% of my effort went towards the face, but there were a couple issues to sort out with the body.  At first I was just working with some default textures from a DAZ release.  What's funny is that they ship these textures out in JPEG format.  Weird, but it saves on file size and at least they didn't compress the hell out of it right?  Wrong.  I encountered what I thought was the terminator problem earlier on but it actually ended up being JPEG compression in the textures.  An hour or two of touch-ups in Photoshop with the various textures helped fix that problem.  At least now I know what to look for.

The torso and the dick also got a fair bit of attention.  What came stock with the normals and the diffuse was just not cutting it.  The normals barely did anything to define her musculature and the diffuse was basically all one color without any blushing, tanning, or imperfections.  I ended up doing some work in Substance Painter sculpting more detailed abs, collar bones, hips, ribs, nipples, dick, etc.   The difference really shows and I'm happy I made the change.  I also went through and painting on the diffuse wherever I could.  It's more subtle, but you might be able to notice it more around her collar, abs, and dick.

Maev's face was a unique challenge.  She was much more clearly defined and much more idealistic than the other characters I'd ported over, which meant she required much more subtle work.  I imagined her as being in her early 30s, so I wanted some imperfections to show through the otherwise ideal visage.  Crows feet, marionette lines, a few skin tabs; enough to make her look like she wasn't engineered in a vat.  I could go farther if I wanted to make her believable, but I'm comfortable leaving her here for now.

I used many of the same techniques on her face that I'd learned about working on other characters: painting the skin, sculpting broad facial features on the normal, etc.  However I could never really replicate a very good look up close with just brushes.  Substance Painter helps me define the shape, but it's difficult and tedious to push it farther.  So I ended up tracking down some facial scan displacement maps and overlayed them on.  With enough finessing I think I finally got them to sit correctly.  It took a while, but now the cheek skin looks like cheek skin, the forehead skin like forehead skin, etc.  There could be more work to be done, but it's finally starting to click.

Sculpting

I usually skip over the part where I sculpt it in DAZ because it really just involves messing with a bunch of sliders, slapping a dick and some textures on and sending it one its way.  Often times it shows up in Blender looking a little different, so I have to do more sculpting.  Other characters take more, but Maev really just required defining her muscles and bringing out the creases in her face.  In the future I'd like to do some asymmetrical sculpting to add a bit more to the character, but I imagine that's pretty difficult.

Hair

Particle hair in Blender is easy to pickup and hard to master.   I recently focused on learning and going more in-depth with the feature, and that came with several improvements.  I'll go into it more in-depth in a Hair R&D post but I have a couple relevant things to share in this one.

Simple versus Interpolated children.  Okay so no one is going to understand what I'm talking about here but bare with me.  Always go with simple child hairs.  If you intend on any kind of physics, child hairs are the way to go.  Interpolated hair is quick and easy, simple hair is time-consuming and sturdy.  I ended up overhauling Maev's hair when I learned about the difference.

Multiple hair layers are also essential.  Ideally you want your main chunk of hair, your frizzy hair, and then your fine hair to smooth out details between the roots and the skin along the hair line.  I still have a lot of room to get better at crafting hair, but now I feel like I understand the landscape a lot better.  I'll probably end up messing with the style a little more in the future, there's still more detail work to be done.

Here are a bunch of passes while I was experimenting with more fine and frizzy hair:

Future Improvements

I've learned a lot but there's still much to do in the future.  As I pointed out in my update earlier, there's no shortage of tech that I need to work on.  At that point a lot of the tech is motion-related, getting the character to animate well.

For now though, I need to refine what I've learned and test it out in animation.  Congratulations if you've made it this far!

Here's a gallery of a bunch of the renders I used in this showcase, a lot of them are in fancy 4K.