Character Showcase: Lucy (Patreon)

It's time again for another one of these.

Lucy's gone through quite a bit of iterations as I try to zero in on a look I'm happy with.  I don't think I'm completely happy with her face, but everything's a work in progress.  I struggle a lot with face sculpting despite making progress in most other departments.  

Recently I've started practicing head sculpting from scratch to get a better feel for the anatomy and workflow.  Even if I'm only really touching up what I make in Daz, it helps a lot to have a solid foundational understanding.  Porting game characters has helped a little bit with this as well because I get to see how they structure their geometry and contour their models.

However the face wasn't really the focus of this project.  I was more concerned with her hair, breasts, and a few other smaller details.  I'll be going over the hair first, but in the future I still plan on making a post all about Blender particle hair even though I've been putting it off.

Hair

I've learned a lot about this particular feature in the past 6 months and that can be reflected in the evolution of Lucy's hair.

You can also see a lot of back-and-forth with her face.  This is where a lot of my frustration with the model comes from.  I'm still not very happy with the face.  I started out with a pretty nice shape but somehow lost that through my edits.  Maybe it's the eyelids, maybe the cheeks, the SSS, the angle, the lighting.  In the end I resorted to makeup to help define her features, but it's a crutch I'd rather not use.  I cannot dwell on it though.  Perfection is the enemy of progress.  More experience will help.

Back to the hair.  I wanted to try out a short and straight cut, assuming it would be relatively versatile and easy to create, but it ended up being a surprising hassle.  I started with interpolated children, a rudimentary hair material, thick strands, and a quick and dirty particle structure.  Over time I refined it by changing the style around, switching to simple children (which give you more control and respond to physics simulations way better), thinning up the strands, creating a more advanced multi-shade hair material, and carefully tweaking/optimizing the positions of the strands.

It turns out making a proper hairstyle that can withstand both close scrutiny and physics simulation can take a lot of careful work.  It's a shame because Lucy's original hair style looked pretty nice for minimal work, but under the hood it was a mess and just couldn't perform well in an animation or at an unfavorable angle.

Breasts

Later on in the development of Lucy I decided I wanted to try doing more custom work on the breasts instead of just leaving it up to the textures that Daz gave me.  I could have went with a custom nipples for Daz, but I wanted to keep my workflow slim so I opted to figure out my own quick custom tweaks.  I ended up employing a variety of methods to define the nipples and areola, including vertex paints for color and specular control, normal map tweaks, and geometry changes.  I'm not quite at the point where I can work out all of the kinks in the polygons yet, but porting Sindel, Cassie, Harley, and Ivy has given me a lot of insight into geometry reconstruction and retopo.

As you can see I kept the breast size very large and went with some pretty big areolas as well.  After my initial tweaks from the Daz import, I really didn't touch the shape of the breasts very much.  They might be the biggest I'm willing to go on an OC.  As I'm able to learn and sculpt more detail out of the body, my tastes might change.

I've spent a lot of time in the lab with breast physics, but I decided to omit all that as my efforts have put me more or less around in circles.  Since Blender 2.82 is going to be coming out with modified physics simulations anyways, I thought I'd wait to experiment with that more first.

Wrinkle Maps, Material Structure, Etc.

Above you can see my current node set-up for Lucy's face material.  Crude and a tad  disorderly, its main purpose is to integrate wrinkle maps into the material.  That top half you can see is all driven math nodes sectioned out by vertex paints and driven by bone positions.  So if I move the inner eyebrows up, it tells the math node which changes its value, runs down the chain, and mixes that section to the corresponding section on a 'stretch' normal map.  Basically, if I move the eyebrows up, you get eyebrow and forehead wrinkles.

Games and of course movies have been doing this for a bit so it's nothing new, but it was kind of fun figuring out the right set-up for it.  It's still got plenty of flaws, like for example the left and right sides of the face aren't separated and there are no measures in place to resolve conflicts between the stretch and compress normal maps, but it's a start.

I've also optimized the material structure to better and more efficiently accommodate enhancements like for adding sweat, tone changes, and makeup.  Really all of this is the end product of me finally figuring out what all the math, mix, and paint nodes are supposed to do.

Conclusion

Greetings to those of you who made it to the bottom!  I know it's not the most exciting read, but it's useful for getting my thoughts out in writing and I can always refer people to these types of post when they start asking me questions about my characters.

Now that my script is done, a lot of my OC creation effort is going to go into preparing assets for that.  Hair, genitals, textures, and materials are pretty much where I want them to be, so I need to focus on clothes, rigs, and geometry.

Here's a gallery of the renders I used in this showcase.