Rendered with 3DsMax, Vray and Ornatrix.

Render time: ~4Hours

Render Resolution: 4192x2358





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Chloe in my Dark Room

● Twitter: twitter.com/DamienDexWilde

A finally finished project, made by someone who has no idea about 3D modelling, filled with the question "how to accomplish this" and lots of rage-quitting. Although never being close to what my perfectionist self, wanted to deliver, 'twas indeed a learning process, and a gateway to better projects perhaps?





Since I feel like writing about my journey on this I would like to tell my learning process during this project and bear in mind that I only know the stuff about basic modelling but nothing more than that. Main idea behind this was to create something that would look natural and in doing so I had to scrap any ideas that would make her too perfect. While I'm doing texturing the skin, I've started analysing people’s skins. Yes, you heard me right. I actually studied in my mind that what makes a human skin different than a normal texture that is literally a painted surface. Why? Just so I could better understand the tools that I am going to use which I had no idea how to use or how to replicate them in a virtual space.

Having the internet on my fingers I decided to search for the material called VraySkinMtl. At first I was delusional enough to expect that when I put this on an object, it would turn out great at the beginning. Spoiler alert, it does not! Apparently for a skin texture, you ought to be teaching your computer to calculate three different layers of the skin just so it would decide to render where the greenish shadowy areas will be. Depending on where light reaches, it shows the colour underneath your skin such as the colour red which happens to be your blood veins. But of course this wasn’t enough. ‘twas all about messing with material settings, going back to change the lights and then changing material again and again and again. Because what was on my mind was to shine those pores just to show I can put a detail. But this got interesting because while project was going on, I was doing my research in both real life and internet and guess what. Humans really like to hide their so called imperfections. So what we do is either put lots of make up on our cheeks or turn the filters/blurs up to eleven. In the end making those pores not visible in most cases. But I wanted that sweet detail and in addition to that, every detail like marks, black spots were preserved.

Another thing was to create specular map. I knew that reflections were important but how would they show themselves? Answer to that was very simple but if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re going to waste time with no real progress. Still, ‘tis a trial and error but apparently all I needed was to make sure where pores are won’t shine, create an actual bump map (it seems that I was not creating something that has enough detail) and the lights. As in any real life situation, your textures won’t shine if light isn’t in the right angle so you have to play with them as well. It sounds easy when I say it but making a change and waiting to render it (even if it’s a minute) is really nerve breaking, especially when you’re just a beginner. I personally prefer to learn by trying it myself so had to press the render button so much I swear to god I can click it with my eyes closed (or could’ve use the shortcut, but what’s learning when all you do is to chose shortcuts!)

For the last part, there comes the hair. While ‘twas the first thing I’ve start with, it ended up with me re-modelling it seven times the whole time. Although Chloe’s hair is gorgeous, it has so many details that you end up trying to fix it by hand. At first I used 3dsmax’s Hair and Fur. While it seems to does the job, I could not get it work for some reason. Some parts were clustering together when you wanted it to spread, sometimes there were empty spots which definitely does not look good some parts were lacking some hair. After sixth attempt I’ve tried little fixes instead of re-doing the whole process but even with my best, I ended up missing some of the core features of her hair. So that’s when I switched to Ornatrix, which offered a very easy way which is modelling the hair with planes rather than splines. Also tried to use my original hair splines to groom the hair but for some reason it really messed up with everything but I’m happy how it turned out. In addition to that my VrayHair material has two colours (as Chloe has in LiS) and this plug-in actually makes the whole gradient colour thing follow the strands (which was hair and fur also supposed to do) but more visible, so win-win for me.

There are lots more details I could write, for instance, I never mentioned the part how many times I wanted to quit but I feel it is enough for now and if you read all this I thank you whole heartedly and hope you enjoyed this little project of mine.