Eyes, Hair and Skin.

Pol and I are very keen to push this piece of work to the next level.We want everything to feel alive, and part of that is to have convincing hair, eyes and skin on our characters. We want all of this to feel 'alive'. Of course, this is a big challenge, and we might be expecting too much of ourself. But why not? We may as well aim for a high standard and not reach it, then aim for a low standard and not feel satisfied.

So, with regards to the hair. I was planning on running some tests with nCloth, and seeing if that would be suitable for simulating hair with. I was hoping to have some form of control wherein we can switch between rigged hair and nCloth dynamic hair as and when it's needed. However, Pol says he has found a way of producing a great hair effect using Soft Bodies. He showed me a sample of this, and I must say, I am very excited by what I see there.

We also plan on using miSSS_fast_skin shader for the characters. This uses a technique known as SubSurface Scatering (SSS) and it really makes the skin feel 'alive'. We have a basic knowledge on how to achieve this, but we don't want to waste too much time experimenting adjusting the fields on old models. We'd rather press on, get the models for this project made, and then tackle Fast_skin with full force.
Anyway, here's a test I did do on an old model:

I like it, it came out quite nice. With more tweaking it could be really good. Also it needs a saturated texture connected up to the Epidermal Scatter Colour for things like the lips, and darkening around the eyes. This model is rather poor, it's an old one of mine. Those eye holes... *shudders*.



So that leaves the eyes. This is where I have been focusing my attention today. I love eyes, and so I was quite excited to try making some. I have been loving some of the results I have been getting.

Here was my first Render, It wasn't giving the results I wanted, and so I actually opened a new scene and restarted.


This one is my second render, It came out a lot better. But it had a weird specularity glow around the eyeball and the actual eye lens.My third render was more successfull. I worked on the textures a bit and I managed to remove the outer glow of the eyeball. But I was still getting a weird line around the iris. This was a modelling issue and wasn't so hard to rectify.
And here is my final render with that model. I learnt a lot already, but there are a few mistakes here. The actual pupil needs to blend with the white. Right now it's very harsh. Unfortunately the model I made doesn't allow me to make this blend, as I seperated the model out and laid out the UVs seperately. So now I shall work on a new one, taking all the good stuff I have learnt and fixing the mistakes I have made. Hopefully from this I can produce a photorealistic eye (or there abouts).

I shall update soon with my progress with that.