I've been playing around with MPFB (MakeHuman Plugin for Blender), trying to figure out the way to bring my 'old' pose assets containing assorted facial expressions (which are currently still problematic with MPFB) to the 'new' models with the MPFB's new, advanced materials.
So, I accidentally jerked the timeline across my carefully laid out facial poses, saw them morph into each other, and found the effect somewhat funny and cheeky, worth rendering. 😁
Oh yes, this is, I believe, my second animation ever rendered in Cycles: it seems that the detail-killing effects of denoising at just 256 samples per frame haven't done too much damage in this case (not that it's very detailed, in the first place).
My broader goal in all of this is to come up with a set of characters that achieve a good compromise between the perfect photorealism of the outcomes of the CG Cookie's Human course and the NPR stylisation of anime and such like: something that could be used in a still render like my very own Sunset Blues, Xiphos from Argos, or On Gravity Waves, or in an animated shortie/music video; something that can 'survive' a quick close-up shot without freaking people out too much by the 'ucanny valley' effect, and yet not require the 'heavy artillery' like LoDs, etc., in less ambitious projects. So, my experimentations also involved some sculpting, then baking some custom normal maps, that sort of things.
That's all, folks! 😉
