One of the nice things about my custom rendering distribution system is that it saves all of the images that have been rendered. This allows me to easily go back through time and collect all of the renderings of a character during the various stages of development. I thought it might be interesting to post one such series for people who aren't familiar with the kind of process I use for getting the "look" of the characters in Sushi Bar Samurai.
I've posted them in chronological order, which may seem counter-intuitive because you will have to go back to earlier items to "start at the beginning"... but, I thought it would be best to do it this way so that the actual timestamps on the images go in the order in which they were actually rendered. Plus, it gives me some incentive to add a button in Nebula for switching the sort order :)
Now that the model is starting to look good to me, it's time to check it under a different lighting scenario to see what I've missed. Here I've rendered Sushina with a standard three-point lighting rig (key, fill, back). I'm pleased with how well she held up on the first run, but I think the pores might be a little too pronounced, or perhaps not carefully placed enough (I tried cheating on this model by making an image map which I used to paint the pores, as opposed to painting them entirely by hand like I did with Chefoni, which takes forever... but I think I didn't do a good enough job making the image map and, I didn't really make it oriented like I should have. So I think I should probably go back and redo her bump map with a little more care and thought).
Also, I haven't really mastered the art of eyeball shading with Maxwell yet. For some reason, the eyes look too cloudy to me all the time. I don't know what's causing this. I definitely need to sit down at some point and make a test array where I can isolate the parameters necessary to get the eyes right. Chefoni's eyes have the same problem.
Here I have backed off the specular (and the diffuse) reflection amounts a bit, since I felt that the face was too shiny and overbrighted before. This brought it down to a more reasonable level of reflection, at least in this lighting scenario, which tends to be washed out (since it's daylight and there is a significant amount of lighting coming from the entire hemisphere).
I guess Sushina's persona will just have to include fastidious hat laundering and starching until the Maxwell bug is fixed. Which, since I'm a beta-tester, is something I should go rattle on about some more and see if I can get it on the shortlist.
And I tried subdividing the hat further, to see if it would fix the bug, but alas... no such luck :(
Here I have tried to make the hat a little more natural by crumpling it up, but unfortunately the afforementioned Maxwell shadow bug rears its ugly head and will clearly make it intractable.
Here I have finished placing all the main eyelashes on both eyes, top and bottom.
I've also painted in a lot more specular throughout the face, since it was a bit under-reflective in a lot of places. However, the overall specular level is too high, so I will tone it down subsequently.
I used to have a lot of trouble doing convincing eyelashes, because I would put plates in (like I did for the head hair) and paint an eyelash texture on it. It just never worked.
Eventually I realized that actually modeling each individual eyelash isn't that time-consuming, because they're all pretty much the same geometry, and you end up with great looking lashes. So now I just go ahead and model every last little eyelash, and it only takes thirty minutes or so and they end up looking just the way I want.
So here I have started placing the lashes onto the right eye.
I felt that the lips were too understated, so I tried adding more red pigmentation. Overall, it may be a little too "lipstick-y", so I may end up backing off a bit on the coloration in the end. But it's reasonably close.
And again, the eyebrows still didn't feel dark enough, so I did one more coat to get them a little blacker. It's hard to find the right balance, I think, because people rarely seem to have eyebrows that match their haircolor. So you have to play around a bit to find the right "other shade" of hair that goes with the hair on their head, but isn't an exact match.
Now I have fixed the bump map and specular map for the eyebrows such that it matches the new eyebrow diffuse map.
