Another little Madelyn update. I’ve started moving into the texture pass, so she’s finally beginning to feel a lot more alive instead of just being a raw model with placeholder materials.
At this stage I’ve been working on the early skin, hair, eyes, outfit materials, and overall color balance. I wanted the outfit to feel elegant and appealing without drowning it in filigree or too many tiny details, since that can make the whole thing feel visually busy really fast. I’d rather keep the design strong and readable than overload it just for the sake of ornamentation.
I also took the time to model the interior of her vulva properly for internal shots, which is one of those details that most people will never bother with, but I wanted the option there for more explicit presentation work later.
For rendering, I work with V-Ray, which comes with its own hair shader. That’s been really useful here, since I can apply it to the modeled hair itself and push it further with a strand bump map. I didn’t really want to deal with the complexity and hassle of hair simulation on this one, so I chose to model the hair manually instead. It gives me a lot more control over the silhouette and presentation, even if it’s a bit of a different route.
You might also notice the eyebrow looks a bit blocky and brown in some of these images. That’s because it uses a transparent mask that doesn’t really show properly in Maya’s viewport, and it shares the same hair material setup.
My texturing workflow is also a bit weird, honestly. I should probably switch over to Substance Painter at some point, but I don’t know it very well yet, so I’ve stuck with the pipeline I know. I use Maya’s built-in compatibility with Autodesk Mudbox for both sculpting and texture painting, export specific texture sections from there, then layer and refine them in Photoshop. After that I’ll also bring in things like occlusion and displacement maps exported from ZBrush for skin definition and detail. It’s definitely unconventional, but it works for me.
Still a lot left to refine, but I’m really happy to finally be seeing her materials and colors start to come together.