At last, here’s a new update of my innkeeper character. Again, it took a little longer than I had expected since my last update, but I’ve had a few commissioned pieces of work that have come in between. Believe it or not, but they take precedence over my personal projects.

Anyway, today I got back in business with this guy again, and here’s the latest snapshot of his current state.

I’ve entered the texturing and shading phase. Since the last post I’ve created the UV’s for him and then spent most of the time building a decent skin shader. The texture maps used at the render above is just some rough placeholders I sketched out quickly to have something to work with when the skin shader reached the final stages. The color map is pretty wild and I’ll remake it from scratch for the next update, and other than that I used a simple normal map to get some structure going on. I’ll remake that one as well.

The skin shader though, am I pretty happy with now. It consist of a large node network built up around 2 SubSurface scattering shaders, 1 OrenNayar shader, 1Blinn shader, 1 Reflection shader and everything mixed together with some mixer nodes and gradients. I’ve tested this shader pretty carefully and it seems to hold up in most lighting environments.

I wanted to get this shader perfect before starting to work with the texture maps for real, so well, here I am. I have a photo session I need to do this weekend for a totally unrelated project, but other than that I think I’ll have enough time to start working on the real textures and post another update shortly.

Working Music: Babyshambles - Shotter’s Nation

Here’s a quick update of my progress with this female character since yesterday. I finalized the facial features tonight, and started working on the shading and textures. Here’s my current state of her.

I’ve finished the eyes and textured them. I’ve also started paint the textures for the skin. There is still some more work left to do around the eyes and mouth, as I want some special things to go on there, but the base layer is in place. I’ve used the new skin node in LightWave 9.2 for the shading which I feed my painted textures into. I’m really enjoying all the new toys in LightWave 9.2.

The next update will probably not be that far from my goal with this image. I’ll have the hair finished, the texure maps, clothing and the rig is also slowly getting in place for her posing. Stay tuned for a new update in a day or two.

Tonights Working Music: Arcade Fire - Neon Bible