Louise

I have been looking to do a character lookdev and lighting for a long time. Thats when i got this free model from Studio Eisko. What i liked about this model was the texture quality was good and also it has a rig. I was thinking of doing characters with some life and pose and expressions were really important for that. Was getting really bored with doing lookdev with characters on T pose and all. So my workflow always starts with collecting some good reference. At first i was trying to go for a happy smiling pose and lighting. At the same time i was planning to do some makeups into the existing texture just to add a bit more story of my own. At that time i came up with a reference image which has a good lighting, a unique makeup and a good expression on character. I decided to go for that look completely. After finalising reference i started light setup on grey shader. The basic lighting positions and intensity were done in a single day. I used an area light as a key light and a dome light with HDRI as a fill light. I started lookdev on the same lighting setup. Also i used different HDRI environments inbetween just to make sure the shader consistency. The main issue i had faced was with the eyebrow fur. The red vertical stroke on the eye shoul go on top of the eyebrow, but the fur was not loading the texture on uv space. It was interactive grooming xgen furand i was no expert on Xgen. I tried looking on internet but i the solutions didn't work. So i decided to render the painted eyebrow as a separate render and comp it on top with a mask. After shading and everything was done, when i rendered the final image the position of keylight was not casting any catch light on the eyes. It was one of my friend's suggestion that the eyes would look much better with a catch light. Even i felt that from the beginning but i really liked the positoin of the shadows from key light and i really didn't wan to change it. Also i thought of not breaking the physical accuracy. But he encouraged me to go for the final beauty and ignore these small cheats. I do photography and i know how much life catch light gives to the eye. But the thought of physical accuracy was blocking me from going for it. As artists i think we should be focusing more on the aesthetics. The technical accuracy is important but if its not giving a good output then we surely can bent the rules a little. I Duplicated the key and light linked it only to the eyes with only specular. That way i don't change the existing lighting and only add the necessary spec.

I was working on this project in my free times. I started this on October 2019 and i was working only 1 hour per day for 4 months. It helped me a lot to get the aesthetics better espoecially when i was texturing the makeups. I have no previous experience on texturing. This is my first attempt on texturing. As the sking was only a single UDIM i decided to do it on photoshop. It was really a long back and forth process. I'll paint some strokes and export it and test render. Then make some correction and rerender again. But overall it was a really good experience for me.

I didn't do much on comp for the render. I added a little more warmth to the render. And also added a background and lens effects such as glow, grains, chromatic abberation etc.