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GLBEmily Smith, the Cyborg
110
INTRODUCTION
"You can fling me into space for all I care, but you will let me hold onto this until my hands turn to ice." - Emily Smith
This is my first attempt at making a photoreal character! I was inspired to take someone from my own sci-fi novels that I wrote in primary and high school, and bring her to life. Herewith, a short bio:
"Four years ago, Emily Smith was transported five hundred years into the future - or was she? In her own time, Emily had become lost and obscure: an introverted postdoctoral physicist, living on a shoestring budget, trapped in a toxic household she could not escape from. In a sense, she had escaped, only to be presented with a wealth of new problems and questions. In her absence, Earth's solar system had become overcrowded with a host of alien species, all claiming to originate from within hidden on Mars, Jupiter, Neptune and their many moons! To Emily's dismay, there was not a single human in sight. She partners with a reclusive Neptunian inventor to seek the cause of her time displacement. All the while, she must conduct diplomacy and scientific missions amidst a chaotic mess of interplanetary rivalries.
Emily worries that her humanity will fade. She figures that, if she takes damage from one more proton gun or Martian space squid, shell be promoted from a cyborg to an android. Will she forget her loved ones, in the absence of any contact or reminder?
In the present moment, Emily has been captured and imprisoned in the Oort cloud, following an extremely risky mission to escape the Solar system. Even worse than capture, is that she nearly lost her closest tie to her past: her red diary."
Tools: Blender, Substance Painter, Krita
Addons: Kit Ops 3 (detailing of prosthetic arm), Retopoflow 3 (modelling cardigan), Realtime Materials 2.0 (clothing materials), Cloudrig (posing)
A special thank you to Kent Trammell and his course "HUMAN", which guided me through all the steps of creating a head entirely from scratch.
SIDE AND BACK PROFILES:
! REPORT
WORK-IN-PROGRESS:
Sculpting the base mesh: after blocking out the important features, I experimented with changing Emily Smith's age, as well as trying to make her appear malnourished. Both were great exercises in making anatomical changes to the character:
Body and retopology: I used an arm and torso that I had sculpted previously - both needed significant modification. If I'm not mistaken my torso is still wrong, as there should be a gap between the ribs and the hips, but oh well I could hide that for the final render. Everything had to be retopologised, which was rather grueling:
Rigging and posing: This was a very long in-between step. I used Blender's Cloudrig addon to pose the body - of course, I had to resculpt the entire body to fix weird proportional changes.
Skin detail 1: My first go at including wrinkle and pore detail - I realised much later, to my dismay, that my wrinkles were overdone for a character in her 20s, and I would have to tone them down. It's so tempting to keep all that effort!
Sculpting the base mesh: after blocking out the important features, I experimented with changing Emily Smith's age, as well as trying to make her appear malnourished. Both were great exercises in making anatomical changes to the character:
Body and retopology: I used an arm and torso that I had sculpted previously - both needed significant modification. If I'm not mistaken my torso is still wrong, as there should be a gap between the ribs and the hips, but oh well I could hide that for the final render. Everything had to be retopologised, which was rather grueling:
Rigging and posing: This was a very long in-between step. I used Blender's Cloudrig addon to pose the body - of course, I had to resculpt the entire body to fix weird proportional changes.
Skin detail 1: My first go at including wrinkle and pore detail - I realised much later, to my dismay, that my wrinkles were overdone for a character in her 20s, and I would have to tone them down. It's so tempting to keep all that effort!
REPLY
! REPORT
WORK-IN-PROGRESS (CONTINUED)
Materials and Hair:
The skin material was built up from scratch (following Kent Trammell's course), so I learned a great deal about how to study skin and layer up imperfections to get a convincing result. With Blender, texture painting is painfully slow, so the texturing is half-paint half-procedural. Some progress shots below - I really needed a lot of faith that Emily would look right in the end!
Also in-between: making produral materials for the eyes, starting off simple with eyelashes and eyebrows, then adding vellus hairs (peach fuzz) to finish off the skin.
The scalp hair was interesting. I argued that Emily Smith doesn't have access to good hair products, so her wavy-curly hair is a bit of a mess. The real reason is that I used Blender's old particle system for hair which is a bit limited - afterwards, I realised Blender had improved its tools for generating hairstyles with geometry nodes, but I didn't have the time to redo the hair and learn geometry nodes with the little time I had. I also found that, at least for this render, it doesn't matter how well I groom the hair - if the material isn't somewhat physically accurate, the final render will look ... bad. At least, I would have had to put in a lot of work to make Blender's old hair shader look the part.
Materials and Hair:
The skin material was built up from scratch (following Kent Trammell's course), so I learned a great deal about how to study skin and layer up imperfections to get a convincing result. With Blender, texture painting is painfully slow, so the texturing is half-paint half-procedural. Some progress shots below - I really needed a lot of faith that Emily would look right in the end!
Also in-between: making produral materials for the eyes, starting off simple with eyelashes and eyebrows, then adding vellus hairs (peach fuzz) to finish off the skin.
The scalp hair was interesting. I argued that Emily Smith doesn't have access to good hair products, so her wavy-curly hair is a bit of a mess. The real reason is that I used Blender's old particle system for hair which is a bit limited - afterwards, I realised Blender had improved its tools for generating hairstyles with geometry nodes, but I didn't have the time to redo the hair and learn geometry nodes with the little time I had. I also found that, at least for this render, it doesn't matter how well I groom the hair - if the material isn't somewhat physically accurate, the final render will look ... bad. At least, I would have had to put in a lot of work to make Blender's old hair shader look the part.
REPLY
! REPORT
Clothes:
Here I relied on sculpting detail to make the clothing visually interesting. The idea was that Emily is in low gravity, so her hair is floating and her cardigan is floating ... you know the drill. For both shirt and cardigan, I decided to add noisy displacement and little hair fibers to create high-fidelity visual interest. I relied on premade fabric materials (Realtime Materials 2.0 addon) and modified these to my liking
Here I relied on sculpting detail to make the clothing visually interesting. The idea was that Emily is in low gravity, so her hair is floating and her cardigan is floating ... you know the drill. For both shirt and cardigan, I decided to add noisy displacement and little hair fibers to create high-fidelity visual interest. I relied on premade fabric materials (Realtime Materials 2.0 addon) and modified these to my liking
REPLY
! REPORT
Prosthetic arm:It was just my luck that, in the middle of the contest, Blender Market offered the biggest sale in Blender history, putting 31 of their top addons in a Humble bundle package! Among these addons, I got access to Kit Ops, which allowed me to add in the types of high level mechanical detail that would usually take me forever to make. I then ALSO realised that, as a student, I actually have access to Substance painter - finally, I had the tools to rough up my prosthetic in highres.
I made some significant modifications to the textures after importing everything to Blender - my parents felt that my arm wasn't sufficiently roughed-up:
I made some significant modifications to the textures after importing everything to Blender - my parents felt that my arm wasn't sufficiently roughed-up:
REPLY
! REPORT
Hand detail: I repeated the skin detailing stage for the hand. At this stage, all the important features of my work were done - on to polishing 
REPLY
! REPORT
