Tomb Raider

[wilflo]

Blender Cycles
Made this for the Weekly CG Challenge on Facebook.

[Aranuvir]

Hi Wilflo,

really nice work. You did a good job with the skin material and it's reflection, maybe around the skin it's a bit to grainy. Did you use a noise texture for bump?
The lighting is well done and I like the reflections in the eye which makes the model look vital. Also good posing of the hands which is imho hard to achieve. The shallow depth of field gives your render an extra touch. Was everything done in Blender or did you use an image editor for postprocessing?
One slight critic, and that's a point I also haven't found a solution, yet: the hair material is looking like plastic. Anisotropic reflections are missing and the parietal hair is looking too smooth.

[wilflo]

Hi Wilflo,

really nice work. You did a good job with the skin material and it's reflection, maybe around the skin it's a bit to grainy. Did you use a noise texture for bump?
The lighting is well done and I like the reflections in the eye which makes the model look vital. Also good posing of the hands which is imho hard to achieve. The shallow depth of field gives your render an extra touch. Was everything done in Blender or did you use an image editor for postprocessing?
One slight critic, and that's a point I also haven't found a solution, yet: the hair material is looking like plastic. Anisotropic reflections are missing and the parietal hair is looking too smooth.

Thank You very much for Your nice feedback, Aranuvir!

Indeed this was made completely in Blender, no other tool used for post processing.
I fully agree with You on Your thoughts about the hair. There is a solution to it, which is to use the hair particle system with a decent hair material (see some of my other posts where I tried that out), however using the hair particle system in Blender is a huge effort (putting the guide hairs in the right place and fighting with the child particles) and jams up the render time. I must admit that I've been too lazy for that here

For the skin material I use a mix of a noise and a voronoi texture for the basic bump. In addition I have used a b/w bump texture for wrinkles, dimples and details that I texture painted directly on the mesh.
Here's my node setup for the skin group. I'm still in progress of further fine tuning it (and will probably never finish ) :

Again, thanks for Your kind comments!

[o4saken]

Just a quick my thought on the hair... I generally always use particle system. One way would be to use the mesh hair as you have done, but add short particles to that which you then just comb smooth to follow the mesh.

Then the way i do it is to use weight painting, this because you can add multiple groups. so to start i would paint the entire scalp where i want the hair (and lets call this weight paint group "A"), duplicate this weight paint group (now "B") , then using a subtract brush remove parts i dont want - lets say i just leave the fringe, now duplicate weight group "A" again, this time subtract paint to remove the fringe and perhaps one side of the head, repeat the steps again this time leaving behind only the other side of hair you have yet to do.(seperating it like this will allow you to get a neat hair path)...
Anyways now you have different groups to which you add hair particles, each one will then be combed to how you like it, you can now emphasize where you made the devisions giving you a clear path, fringe etc, and its easier to manage as its not just one mess.

EDIT: HERE IS A BETTER TUTORIAL EXPLANATION.... https://bensimonds.com/2011/02/17/hair-in-blender/

And render time....if it is too intense then what i do is once you have everything set to how you want, including the blender post render node setup if you are using, and you can see it is looking like you would want, save the blend file and use the command prompt command to render the image... works super quickly.


Oh...and before i forget... AWESOME image!!!

[Aranuvir]

Oops, don't write comments at a late hour : I wanted to say, the skin looks a bit to grainy around the chin.
Well, that's the downside of using procedural textures. Theoretical you could paint a mask to control the bump effect on different parts of the skin. But, please, take this as critics on a high level. I think your current node setup is a very good compromise.

Just some words to particle hair (your lollipop lady has awesome hair): I'm lacking the artistic skills and patients to get this done. There is a good free tutorial series on cgcookies about particle hair, describing the usage with different vertex groups. But doing this is to much work for me. Maybe I could achieve, after spending lots of time, this yet "simple" hair cut of the lollipop lady, but doing something like a ponytail or braid is completely unreachable. And, yes, I had tried particles on the mesh hair, but wasn't too happy with my result. The point about render time will be omitted here...
So, using the mesh hair from MH is the better solution for me. Unfortunately it isn't easy to setup a good cycles material with the current textures.

[wilflo]

Just a quick my thought on the hair... I generally always use particle system. One way would be to use the mesh hair as you have done, but add short particles to that which you then just comb smooth to follow the mesh.

Then the way i do it is to use weight painting, this because you can add multiple groups. so to start i would paint the entire scalp where i want the hair (and lets call this weight paint group "A"), duplicate this weight paint group (now "B") , then using a subtract brush remove parts i dont want - lets say i just leave the fringe, now duplicate weight group "A" again, this time subtract paint to remove the fringe and perhaps one side of the head, repeat the steps again this time leaving behind only the other side of hair you have yet to do.(seperating it like this will allow you to get a neat hair path)...
Anyways now you have different groups to which you add hair particles, each one will then be combed to how you like it, you can now emphasize where you made the devisions giving you a clear path, fringe etc, and its easier to manage as its not just one mess.

EDIT: HERE IS A BETTER TUTORIAL EXPLANATION.... https://bensimonds.com/2011/02/17/hair-in-blender/

And render time....if it is too intense then what i do is once you have everything set to how you want, including the blender post render node setup if you are using, and you can see it is looking like you would want, save the blend file and use the command prompt command to render the image... works super quickly.


Oh...and before i forget... AWESOME image!!!

Yeah, the tutorial is pretty good.
From time to time I actually do work with particle hair, but well... often I'm not patient enough for it

[wilflo]

Oops, don't write comments at a late hour : I wanted to say, the skin looks a bit to grainy around the chin.
Well, that's the downside of using procedural textures. Theoretical you could paint a mask to control the bump effect on different parts of the skin. But, please, take this as critics on a high level. I think your current node setup is a very good compromise.

Just some words to particle hair (your lollipop lady has awesome hair): I'm lacking the artistic skills and patients to get this done. There is a good free tutorial series on cgcookies about particle hair, describing the usage with different vertex groups. But doing this is to much work for me. Maybe I could achieve, after spending lots of time, this yet "simple" hair cut of the lollipop lady, but doing something like a ponytail or braid is completely unreachable. And, yes, I had tried particles on the mesh hair, but wasn't too happy with my result. The point about render time will be omitted here...
So, using the mesh hair from MH is the better solution for me. Unfortunately it isn't easy to setup a good cycles material with the current textures.

Hehe, guess why I added this bump mix input to my shader group. I'm already prepared adding a weight texture there
Maybe next time I'll try something with that, too... Step by step, You know?
But first I guess I'll need to study some reference for that....

[nepemex]

wow!! must learn how to use nods in blender... nice job!!!