body texturing and hair

The body was pretty challenging to texture not only for the number of piece I had to paint but also because of the number of different material composing the suit. I had to create shaders for leather, fabric, rubber and metal plastic. It took me about a week to paint every thin and another couple of to make the displacement work. Here is the character final look

I started first with scarf and the neck piece.  I wanted to make it look fuzzy using but I was not very happy with the result the shadow where looking weird and it add it to much to the render time.

 The second problem with the scarf was that it canceled the subsurface look of the skin. So I decided to use A misss fast for the scarf to leave some of the light go through. 

It worked but I still have to much shadow on some part of her face. To solve this I created a dim red fell light. The color map, bump, and displacement map were created in Zbrush and retouch in Photoshop.

The neck was an interesting piece to work on because I reuse the setting of the shader on other part of the body. I used blinn shader to create the metal and plastic look.  The chrome piece where textured using Mia material X.

The boots were a challenge as well I could not get the leather look I was looking for. First I used a fast skin shader but the look was horrible, it resemble fired chicken my second approach to create specular material but it wash out my color map too much. It is when I realized that color look that because the specularity color was white and it is what shown in the high light. So I just created map specular color map with the color I wanted.  I used the same technique for the specularity on the body.

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The leg where challenging as well because I had to convey the look of different material form the same piece of geometry while having displacement and bump. I couldn’t select the polygon and assign a material to them because the geometry did not correspond to design of the suit. 

Legs and arms map

The solution was to create a layered material linked. First, I created the layer shader nod apply to the mesh and set up my displacement map. The second step was to create the shader with the material quality I wanted and the bump map. Then, I created a transparency map to mask the part of the map I did not want the shader to show. The last step was to connect find in which order the nods had to be connected the layer shader. After few try I found out that the shader with the transparency map goes on the top. I used the same technique for the upper body. All the map were created with Zbrush and Photoshop.

The hairs were created using a maya hair system. It was not very easy to get wanted result mostly dueto the poor look of the specularity. I added a color ramp for the specular color; I kept ramp type on V Ramp and put the interpolation on smooth. Then played with selected color option to control where I wanted the light to bounce. Using this technique I was able to simulate the effect of shadow where the hairs are under the hood and to compensate for the fell light I used to lighten the shadow on the face.