Started making skin shader. Nothing special, just a mix of SSS and Glossy with custom Fresnel curve. Regarding textures there are only Color, Bump and Displacement maps. Skin still needs some variation in terms of color. Gonna make a roughness map tomorrow. Or maybe I will do a peach fuzz.
High-Rez is here on my DA page
Hey buddy,How are you?? Nicely done so far.She looks sooo cute.I really like the eye’s texture.I really have to spend some times practicing other render engines as well. Believe it or not I’ve never used one.Anyway can’t wait to see your next update.;)
PS Yeah I can’t see the high-res image here.Sometimes it doesn’t show my works too.Not sure what’s wrong with it.
For eyes which method you used?
Diablo
Thank you my friend for the kind words. I am glad that you like her.
Yeah, beautiful girls should have beautiful eyes. Painting and sculpting eyes is a true pleasure - it might not be so obvious from a distance but each iris contains a small landscape inside it. Here is a nice link to see how beautiful they can be.
I really encourage you to check the Cycles. It has so many parameters for fine-tuning, allowing to make very complex materials and lighting. Very straightforward and relatively easy to learn. And if you have a good graphic card or at least modern CPU you will be surprised with its speed. It has some weaknesses but it is totally free so it is definitely worth to check it. Have no idea why it is still not so popular and why people use Keyshot instead (which is limited and pricey).
eliar123
Hi! Right now I have two objects per eye: the actual eyeball and slightly bigger sphere around for reflections and refractions. This sphere has a small bump representing cornea for proper refraction of the iris The eyeball is still temporary and rough (just a sculpted eye straight from Zbrush) and has no subsurface scattering or bump, only weak broad reflections. The concavity of Iris is slightly exaggerated for better depth. I will also add the third part - the liquid between the eyeball and eyelids.
I hope that helps.
Hello, guys. I hope you are all doing well this days.
I have a little problem with my project and cannot find a workaround. Maybe someone will help me. Actually, the problem is quite old since I encountered it when started using Zbrush.
A bit of history. As many of you probably know that Zbrush always had problems with managing UVs. Till the recent updates ZBrush couldn’t properly smooth UV coordinates and was keeping them non-smoothed. To make it even more confusing, there were SmoothUV buttons in Normal/Displacement sub-palettes to average coordinates when baking maps, but it appears that smoothing was performed based on current and not from the lowest subdivision level. So if you bake Displacements from 1st level your maps would appear nice and not distorted, but when you bake Normal maps from 4th level, then Zbrush will try to smooth very dense UVs that will result in still angular (distorted) texture. Plus when baking polypaint there is no Smooth UV’s option at all.
Now they added SUV and ReUV buttons in Geometry subpalette and it might look like the end of the headache. But there is a problem. When you subdivide your unwrapped basemeshes, export/import it with GoZ, reconstruct subdivision levels and perform other numerous operations it constantly SHRINKS and SHIFTS UV coordinates so at the end of sculpting they differ a lot compare to those in basemeshes. And this changes might cause huge problems. The obvious solution is to make all the work inside of Zbrush first and then transfer UVs from previously stored low-poly. And this leads to another problem. Zbrush does something to meshes that breaks this workflow. I tried copying UVs straight inside Zbrush via UVMaster, also in Maya and in Blender. It transfers coordinates from basemesh to 1st subdivision level, but each polygon becomes a separate UV island that explodes when you try to sew it. It appears like Zbrush messes vertex order though I’m completely sure that I preserved the order during import/export.
I have an already finished model in Blender with subdivision and other modifiers that I would like to paint in Zbrush. Then bake polypaint and use this texture in my original model.
So did you encounter a similar problem? And if so, how do you deal with it?
Started working on props. At the same time learning Cycles.
Diablo Man, sorry, I promised to show you some miscellaneous stuff several months ago but didn’t post any images. Well, at least now some of them are properly rendered. The knife and holster I did quite quickly so it looks crappy. If I had a time I will polish it more. There are other jewelry (pendants, ring), but these aren’t too important to show. I also started making smoke simulations for her magic stick. Here is a link
How cool is that.Everything looks great so far Anton.Love that smoke simulation & those potion bottles.All renders in Blender??? Wooow.Guess I have to give it a shot.Man you have to finish this piece soon, can’t wait to see the final result.Goodluck & have fun ;);)
Thank you, my friend! Yes, Cycles is really cool and able to render anything you can imagine including volumetrics, particles, different optic effects etc. My stuff here is very basic. Real pros can do jaw-dropping renders with very complex shaders.
I hope to finish her more or less soon. I wanna make everything perfect so it might take some time. Plus I still have lots of stuff to do (finish her pet, then detail a dragon, model environment etc). But I will post renders of her in rest pose before starting modeling all this stuff.
Vir, i’m studying for character artist and been using vray with max. I came from blender in 3d and i have to say that is very inspiring what you are trying to accomplish here. I really love the program but it made me change because of the problems already mentioned here. Still i might come back with retopology and hardsurface in the future because of the simplicity. Have you tried V-ray for blender? Keep up the great work!
Thank you for the kind words. It means a lot.
Some people already suggested trying V-ray for Blender but I still hadn’t time to check it. But I love it in advance since I saw so many great artists producing incredible results. I will try it for sure. Maybe with new project.
What kind of problems you are talking about? Are they related to Cycles particular or Blender overall? I use Blender mostly for modeling and now for rendering so my knowledge is limited to this two fields but I will be glad to help.
I don’t work with blender for some time but most of my problems were in modeling for the lack of tools to accomplish some things that i could do with ease in max, other bugs with cycles like the render noise and other things like trying to make the skin quality like modo or vray. Does cycles accept displacement maps?? As i said, it has been a while 
I really would love to bring him back to workflow, like instead of making zbrush mesh retopology in maya and render it with v-ray, make that part in blender. I can see the hair it’s still a tricky thing to do but you got nice results.
Interesting. I can’t even remember situations when I failed to model something in Blender. With polygons of course, its NURB’s tools were always rudimentary. Also I should admit that real power of Blender is in add-ons. There are many extensions adding different tools from Max or CAD programs. I have no idea why all this stuff isn’t officially included by default. Can you describe what kind of tools you lack in Blender or maybe what type of models were hard to create in it? I’m really interested cause I enjoy solving problems like this.
Yeah, you can use displacement modifier for that (I think it was here forever). The only problem is that it uses brute force and subdivides the whole model into quads rather then tesselating it into triangles and add more resolution when needed. This feature in Maya is really awesome and I miss it in Blender. Now there is feature called Cycles Displacement which can work as false (bump) or true, but it is still in development.
Speaking about noise. Cycles really improved in reducing noise. I believe they rewrite the algorithm a couple versions ago. And they added light portals for indoor scenarios. For HDR lighting there is a checkbox to generate blurred map which gives a tremendous effect. When turned on, the object with simple diffuse shader and at starting 25 samples renders like with 300 samples without map, but many times faster. Plus most of the noise comes from caustics which is turned on by default. Now you can turn off reflective and refractive caustic separately.
Why not retopologizing stuff in Blender? All models you can see in my thread were retopologized in it without any problems. I also heard that Retopoflow is not bad tool for drawing topology so you might check it.
Well, the hair is tricky when trying to export Fibermesh. But if styling it straight in Blender then it is not that bad alternative. As I said previously the main problem is odd brush behavior (at least they differ a lot compare to Grooming brushes in Zbrush), not too much settings for brushes (like adding alpha, twist etc), bad control over the hair clump flatness and nasty visual representation in vewport. But it gives a lot of control over the final look and, most important, the amount of hair. At least I personally encountered situations when the haircut in Zbrush is done but the hair is too sparse. The only solution is to make them thicker but the final result looks less realistic. Combing ~100 000 hairs is a real pain in ass. While In blender you can create several hundreds of guides and then add children strands. It also saves memory a lot.
Sorry for a lot of text. I have a free time that I should spend somehow :lol:
Hmmm your convincing me my friend ahaha i might jump from maya to blender or test them both, trying to push the blender limits Well i can’t remember what problems i had. Can’t remember if it was because of the subdivisions, bevels or something else but it might have been solved by now… it was a long long time ago xD by that time i was doing architecture and vehicle modeling. It’s great to hear a good improvement from cycles… i always thought it had potential. Do you recommend any tuts for Cycles? I know that the basics of modeling there are tons of it. About Retopology, i’ve seen retopoflow and i was kinda amzed that and other plugins. You get most of the plugins from where? Blender artists?
Since i don’t have nothing new here, just for fun, this is what i made in blender and cycles (except the lambo that was done in max/mentalray). http://andrelopes.weebly.com/index.html Oldies
No worries about the text! Keep posting!
Yeah, in term of modeling Blender became really nice. I remember like three-four years ago there wasn’t even n-gon support, lol. Now they develop realtime boolean modeling that supports complex n-gons.
Oh, bevels. Yes, these days when beveling in Blender was performed by third-party script :rolleyes:. I remember how jealous I was when I saw Quad Chamfer (or how it is called) for Max. Fortunately now there is a similar thing in Blender (weighting, tension, division, profile) both as a tool and as modifier for non-linear modeling workflow. And speaking about subdivisions - the only problem I can recall is a well known bug when subsurf modifier at the end of stack caused low FPS in viewport. Can be fixed with enabling VBO in preferences and putting non-active Simple-deform modifier below. But you shouldn’t worry about that since this week comes version 2.77 where this issue is finally resolved.
Unfortunately, the main Cycles developer moved to another company that develops Arnold renderer. So now evolution of Cycles is a bit slowed down.
I download most of extensions here. Or here (better illustrated). Or sometimes find them straight on YouTube. Here is a good video with the one of the most useful add-ons. BlenderArtists is down several weaks already. Have no idea what’s happened to them.
Speaking about tutorials. I am mostly self-taught (it is very intuitive plus there are also tooltips like in Zbrush). BlenderCookie was good a couple years ago. Now most of their tutorials aren’t free and… don’t laugh, but they redesigned everything so I cannot even find their old stuff. For rendering Anrew Price from BlenderGuru is good. But for the most part I just watch stuff on YouTube.
Good, it appears that you already get hang of it so you just need to learn new stuff that was added in recent versions. I personally have real difficulties with setting lighting, materials and all that stuff.
Beside the new thing, i have to learn again the old ones ahahaha Thank you so much for the share! Right now im studying anatomy with zbrush. Later,when i start shading and rendering i’ll give blender a go
Keep up with the updates plz!
You are welcome. I’m glad if that was helpful.
And thank you, I will try post more stuff soon.
Just some drapery sculpting I did for practice and to train my eye. Always feel guilty when copying stuff from photos or drawings. But that was a nice exercise.
Still need to polish the first one and render it properly.
loved it!
Thank you! Love your sculpts too. Especially the last girl. Hope to see her finished one day.
beautiful work on these drapery sketches.
keep it coming.
-r
