The Nun

The Nun 

The Nun was my first "fun" project. To set the scene this was during Term 4 at Pixl Visn, we were knee deep into our team Pipeline project, and entirely focused on only that. Then comes along the Midterm - it was 1 week - and I said - this is my time to take a break and do something entirely different from the group project - something I would do in my own time - a scary...yet sexy... nun. 

Some of the reference images got a bit gruesome - and ironically the Nun still wasn't. 

As you can see in the video - this nun has been retouched. It was my first time trying to create realistic skin textures with approaches I had just learned and not much experience with Mari at the time. Needless to say it was a hectic week of getting from 0 to 100 - and falling short. 

Some months later, I wanted to revisit the Nun one more time, and give her a little surgery.

Some of the procedures included:

- First transitioning her shaders from Arnold to Redshift (better render times)

- Going back into Zbrush and adding more defined scars/wrinkles to my displacement- this was to address the issue of cohesiveness between the jaw and upper section of the face.

- Creating a subsurface map (in the previous version it did not exist)

- Adding better variation into the base color and roughness maps (which helped integrate the teeth with the skin a little better)

- Adding a coat with bump information

- Giving her a new head wrap as the previous version had intersecting geometry and all kinds of rushed activity 

And finally....the biggest lesson of this process - to let go and move on.

Of course there are tons of aspects I would still have liked to change or improve but the takeaway here was to learn what worked and what didn't, and use that in my future projects.