For this week's work, I had to redo my UVs again.
I'm not even surprised at this point.
To start the week off, I added a few elements to my shader to make it more "pop"-y.
To begin, I added a gradient to the base shader to make the light break more dramatic, and created a custom palette for the shadowed areas to make it more saturated and colorful.
The way the shader works is it takes the shade palette and mixes it in to the shaded color ramp, then mixes that base shade color into a gradient color ramp that is clamped by the same base diffuse shade color ramp. It's a bit sloppy, but it ends up getting the job done.
Then, I moved on to correcting the face normals. The big hurdle was the ugly looking highlight lip highlight, and a technique I found posted by Royal Skies actually fixed it very easily.
Essentially, I created a smooth hull copy of the head, and then transferred the normals with a Transfer Data modifier.
The results worked just as I wanted, and the face looks a ton cleaner after the fact.
Finally, for the last of this week, I added a completely new element to the model: anisotropic highlights for the hair.
To make this shading technique work for the hair, it was dependent on UV coordinate data and math to dictate where the highlights would be.
To begin, I stretched the hair UVs along the entirety of the texture map on the y axis, creating color blocks as I had them before and creating the interior lines on the hair as before.
Then, I copied the shader node network used in Lightning Boy Studio's Anisotropic Hair Tutorial to create the highlight effect on Aurora's hair.
Essentially, the shader takes the UV coordinate data and uses the Y value to determine where the highlight should be, and the X value to determine the noise effect. There are a few different layers to the noise to create varied waves and highlights as well.
Then, a Vector Transform node is used to get the value of the camera angle and use that to determine the position of the highlight on the UV Y coordinate axis, making the highlight shift up and down as the camera rotates or pans lower or higher. This is fed into a color ramp which acts as the base color factor for the highlight.
This color ramp is then fed into a few conditionals. The specular is multiplied into the color ramp, and then the same color ramp used to determine the shadow on the hair is multiplied into it as well. This makes it so the highlights will only appear on the specular, and not in areas that are in shadow.
The work really speaks for itself. It gives a ton of much needed definition to the hair while staying cartoony and stylized, and the effect shifts around with the camera angle, making it look super dynamic.
And with that, she's looking nearly done! Might go over her rigging and features one last time before finalizing her design and creating a reel, but overall, I'm MUCH happier with her design after the shader changes. She feels so much more alive and stylish compared to when she had a standard principled BSDF.
That's all for now, stay tuned!
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