The Road to 3D Grooming. My Story. Part 11 - 2018 - Hair Grooming/Lookdev for Camilla

This piece came about at a moment when I'd gotten a little tired of realism 😄

I was taking a break after yet another big client project and decided to just practice different hairstyles. I wanted something cartoony, cute, something I could freely experiment with. I've always loved cartoons, so pretty soon I came up with the idea of making myself a dedicated mannequin for experiments like that.

But a plain faceless mannequin felt boring. I wanted a character.

And that's how Camilla was born =)

I deliberately made her a cute little doll, so later I could swap her hairstyles, try out different shapes and silhouettes, and generally torture her hair however I pleased 😄

I modeled and sculpted her in my beloved 3D-Coat. Back then I still did retopology in NVIL, because at the time I wasn't a big fan of the retopo tools in 3D-Coat. I used Substance Painter for texturing and creating maps for the Corona Renderer material. And the hair, of course, was done in Ornatrix.

It's especially interesting for me to look back at this piece after all this time.

Because today I'd do a lot of things here very differently 😄

For example, back then I wasn't yet sitting over every single guide, hunting down intersections and combing out every last detail. And there wasn't really a proper tool for final tweaks on already generated hair anyway. Now you can just drop Edit Guides on top of the hair and calmly fix individual details based on the result, instead of trying to solve absolutely everything at the level of the original guides.

I didn't really bother with baby hairs back then either. Now I look at the hairline and immediately think: yep, I'd definitely give this area a good pass 😄 But back then... well, a little bald, but whatever 😂

And that's exactly why I love revisiting my old work every now and then, and I'm not embarrassed to show it at all.

It's very easy to look at someone else's work after ten years of practice and think: "Well, of course, he just knows how to do it." Then you open your own old projects and remember that there was a time when you couldn't see half the things you now spot in a second.

I had to start somewhere too. Sometimes I didn't know how, sometimes I did things sloppily, and sometimes I look at it years later and think: "God, why didn't I fix that?" 😂

And that's okay.

That's pretty much how skill grows: you make something, look at it, realize it could be better, and make it again. And again. And at some point you notice that the things you used to sit over racking your brain, you now do almost on autopilot.

As for Camilla, she's stayed a little snapshot of that period. And to be honest, I kind of like that she's not perfect =)

Soft: 3ds Max, Ornatrix, Corona Renderer
More renders HERE