Meet Mushroom

And this is it, That's my final update to my MeetMat3 entry.
From the last update I retouched some things here and there:
First I realized that the colors looked a bit too cartoonish, so I changed the moss and grass color values, for a slightly more realistic look.
Then I remade most of the moss that earlier was just a bunch of height noise and also added some mycelium webs growing here and there.
Finally I gave the mushrooms some more texture and color variation.

I made the renders in Marmoset Toolbag as it's the one I am more familiar with it and it gives me good control over the lights.

I'm glad I participated in this contest as I've learned a lot during the process and got to use a lot of features that I hadn't fully explored yet.
Because of the organic nature of the project I didn't get to use the new paths feature much, other than for cleaning up the mask of the shiitake cap.
Anchor points were used extensively for defining the mushrooms and the areas covered in moss and lichens, and also things like the veins of the morel cap.
I tried a new approach where I defined those masks in a hidden folder before everything else, so that I could get a quick preview of the overall look and then use the anchor points to recall them and use filters on them, levels or subtract them from other masks, to get the results I wanted.
I also learned the power of the clone stamp for quickly fixing and covering parts of the procedural textures that I didn't like, or to just copy handmade parts without needing to do them all over again.

The ground is finished too, the grass is a simple noise used as a height map, interrupted here and there by some stones and mushroom caps.
Now I'm just refining the rest, trying to make the head look more realistic and finding the right amount of scattering for the mushroom materials

I changed the heightmap of the lichens into something a bit more bumpy, that looked more similar to my references. It's made of some warped paraboloids fused together in lighten mode, an outline to separate them better and some manual retouch to parts of the edges of the mask.
I also made the mushrooms a bit more interesting

I'm happy to announce that I've finally reached that stage where that feeling of "what am I doing?" is gone and the project seems to proceed in the right direction

Eating some shiitake mushrooms finally gave me a good idea on how to make the face.
Yea, it's a shiitake inside a morel.

I added more details to the body with some lichens. I used the base material that comes with Painter and added some bigger lichens on top using grunge maps and generators

This is how it's progressing. The head is heading (hehe) in the right direction, but for now I want to bring everything to a decent draft level and then proceed to refine everything.
As for the mushrooms on the body I was thinking of making them on Designer, but in the end I decided to try sculpting them by hand through the height map.

This is the general idea of what I'm gonna try to do:
A tree bark Meet Mat covered in moss and mushrooms. The head will be a Morel Mushroom cap.
I have yet to decide what I'm gonna do with the face and the base will be some general wood ground.
It will be the first time I work with displacement, so how it will turn out to be is shrouded in mystery even for me