Sep. '15 contest contribution: "Deflowering Rose"

[grinsegold]

Manufactured with makehuman, blender and gimp.
The texture on the pillow was a gift from pixar, that one for the petals from cgtextures.

[joepal]

Ok, that is easily one of the best pieces I've seen made with MH as of yet. I'm impressed.

[wolgade]

Good luck to anyone trying to beat this contribution.

I assume you made your own skin texture. Did you use the original uv layout? Fingernails are a bit too detailed to be just painted on the default uv layout.

[duststorm]

Simply wow...
This is an amazing image
If you would like to share more, it would be very nice to know what steps you took to go from the MakeHuman export to this render.

[grinsegold]

I assume you made your own skin texture. Did you use the original uv layout? Fingernails are a bit too detailed to be just painted on the default uv layout.

I used the default UV layout as well as the default texture. Just cranked up its contrast and used the pointiness-attribute as spec map.

The fingernail verts, as well as the lips, are assigned to a second material - just a red and a white glossy shader, driven by a fresnel. There are some minor issues with the subsurface scattering, since i imported the model into blender with a scale of 0.1. The SSS-node works relative to blender-units, so small objects are hard to be dialed right. Look at the strange glow at her throat and her left sholder.
So, no, i didn't use a custom texture. In fact the textures of mh are one of the best things about it. I still use 1.0.2, but i saw Aethelraed Unraed's entry for the August contest. I assume that he used a regular texture of a nightly build. If so, i can't wait to download mh 1.1.0. What a great software!

[grinsegold]

If you would like to share more, it would be very nice to know what steps you took to go from the MakeHuman export to this render.

Ok, i'll try:
The pillow is based on a tut on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZIW73NfXgQ), with the model - roughly posed - as collision object.
The rose is just some bended planes with a rose-petal texture, with velvet-, translucent- and glossy-shader, bumpnode etc.
My custom skin shader i posted already.
The hair was easier than i thought. The interpolated strands worked pretty well this time. Here some settings for the hair:

hair shader

particle system for left skulp

first particle system for right skulp

second particle system for even longer strands at right skulp

To prevent the children strands to grow on weird spots, it's best to extract a skulp-mesh from the avatar. Placing each strand manually gives full control, enabling children and "interpolate" fills the gaps.

The pre- and post-processing color management:

pre-render color management

post processing in blender

...and final color tuning in gimp (giving the skin back some blue hue).

[learning]

It is hard to outdo your June contribution, but you came pretty darn close!

[Aethelraed_Unraed]

Quite beautiful, well done!

So, no, i didn't use a custom texture. In fact the textures of mh are one of the best things about it. I still use 1.0.2, but i saw Aethelraed Unraed's entry for the August contest. I assume that he used a regular texture of a nightly build. If so, i can't wait to download mh 1.1.0. What a great software!

You're correct in your assumption. I did pass the texture through an SSS-based skin shader, but apart from that it's the default texture.

I do recommend the nightly builds, they add some nice new features compared to 1.0.2, and I've yet to come across a bug.

[jujube]

I'm impressed by the hair, it must have taken hours to have it rest naturally like that without any of it passing through any of the meshes (or maybe that's just me).

[grinsegold]

It must have taken hours to have it rest naturally like that without any of it passing through any of the meshes.

No, not really. As i mentioned earlier, there is this "Interpolate"-button in the toolshelf of the particle edit mode (where you comb the hair). You create a hair particle system with zero strands, go into particle edit mode, add your first single strand and pose it. With "interpolated" enabled, blender tries to guess where any further strand would grow, so if you proceed adding strands manually, they will easily look usable. A bit like child strands, if you will. If you watch closely the pictures above, you will recognize that i only added 149 strands in total, using this method. if some strands poke through the cussion, just comb those edit points up. That needn't to be perfect - noone will notice.
All in all, this won't take much longer than an hour or two, including tweaking (combing single edit points). Try it, it's fun!