Adventures across the 3rd dimension

Barber: "Good morning, Lumpy Sir. What can I do for you on this fine day?"
Lumpy Man: "Well, I know I look pretty stupid, almost like a character from Oblivion-"
Barber: "Unmodded Oblivion, if you don't mind me saying."
Lumpy Man: "Indeed. But I was wondering. Could you possibly make me look even more ridiculous?"
Barber: "Hmm, let me think... Perhaps something like this?"

 


Lumpy Man: "Yes! Yes! That's exactly what I was looking for. Tell me, however did you achieve that amazing texture?"
Barber: "That, my friend, is a trade secret known only to those who haven't watched enough tutorial videos."

I was a bit confused why I couldn't find the "Principled Hair" shader in the nodey thing but a bit of research reveals that it doesn't work with Eevee and only appears if you've selected the Cycles renderer.

But, whatever the texture is supposed to look like, it is indeed a terrible haircut. It's very hard to control that damn comb and the scissors are a bit too efficient.

EDIT: *watches some more videos*
I've just discovered that you can have more than one vertex paint map thingy.
That means you can use them for different things like you can with UV textures, such as specular maps, subsurface maps etc. And if I combine the latter with that Dirty Vertex Colour function then maybe that will finally help me to solve the not-dark-enough-nostrils?
Maybe.

Tried to give him a beard today but I messed up by not duplicating the emitter polygons before separating them resulting in all the hairs growing out of a massive hole on his face.
And my obsession with trying to get darker nostrils was somewhat misguided. I thought it was a lighting/shader/SSS/AO issue but it's really a consequence of using the realtime Eevee renderer rather than the more accurate Cycles. When I rendered it there (sloooowly) the nostrils looked fine.
But I don't really like Cycles.
It always looks a little too grainy and if you don't have a superpowered PC the viewport preview never seems to finish.

At least my second layer Dirty Vertex Colour map worked. Not for the SSS as I'd first imagined. Instead it works rather well as an Ambient Occlusion replacement when you include it as a multiply mix node.

That's OK. I didn't understand most of it last week.

After seeing the bizarre faces in the new eFootball game I suddenly don't feel quite so bad about my still awful lumpy man...

 
 

Hmm, Should I try and do a 3D handless Orc?

 

I'll post it here rather than in the challenge WIP thread as I'm not confident that it will progress at all. But if it does look like I may complete it then I will do a switcheroo and post it there too.