Asherah the Elf, head-shot pose

Here is a quick render of a basic head-shot pose of one of the characters in the books I am writing. Her name is Asherah. She’s an Elf. The mesh itself is a combination of various Daz3d G2 figures. A bit of Girl 6 for the head, a bit of Josie 6 for the body, as well as Nastya and various other figures and tons of morphing. All of this I exported out to OBJ files and brought into Blender for the final work. I created my own normal maps, tweaked the textures I pulled in from Wachiwi, created a new set of textures for her fur patterns and hair coloring, and created the hair and fur using the Blender particle system. Rendered in Cycles.

It completed rendering earlier this morning and I needed to get to work, so I didn’t have time to go into the nodes and begin post-processing of the image yet, but I did toss her into Gimp, put a quick background behind her, applied a few effects, slightly desaturated her so she wasn’t so… saturated… on mobile phones and here she is in all her 2400x1600 glory. I have about a dozen other poses and compositions I want to work on for my book cover project now that this render is finally finished. 51 hours. Chalk it up to the fur and SSS. I really need to build a renderfarm so I can send these projects over to be rendered while I continue working…

UPDATE: Thanks to recommendations in this thread, among others, the NEW Finished Image is posted to the left of or above the old Finished Image. :slight_smile: I lightened the texture-map for her fur, gave the fur more strays and fluff, tweaked the irises, tweaked the reflection on the eyes, and made various other modifications to produce a cleaner looking fur.



Eyes and hair looking great. Skin and fur need need some work.

I agree with Photox, especially the eyes. They have great soul! :slight_smile:

Thanks!!! Am always open to pointers and critique. I have several more poses for her so any little improvements I can make will make a big impact.

The change from fur to no fur around the lips seems too hard. It should be softer. I am guessing that right now you are just using a vertex group to control density. You can increase the size of the vert group to go into the lips 1 loop or so, and then use a black and white uv mask with soft edges to control the density.

Also in particle edit when you comb the hair you can grow/shrink the length, right now it seems the same length everywhere some variation and slightly longer hair might bring it to life more.

Thanks! Excellent suggestions. I used weight-painting to control the placement, length and density of the fur on the face. I could tweak it more, methinks. And I like the variation in the length recommendation. I had planned that for the guys but will give a more critical eye regarding that for Asherah. Here is a screenshot of how I have the weight paint set up currently for her face:


Experimenting with her fur. I lightened the texture and shifted it to be yellower and less pink. Normally I have to desaturate the image once it’s done rendering. The unmodified old image is to the left and the test render is to the right. Thoughts? One or the other or somewhere in between?


I tend to like the darker version. If you can post a version with less rim light, stronger key and less fill. The soul of this piece is the eyes, and they are really nice. If you feel like posting your setup, and nodes that would be great. I’m always looking for new ideas on eyes.

The fur is pretty solid, but I still keep experimenting with it. It looks elfish, almost like deer fur.

The skin looks too orange, but it’s possible it’s just my screen. I might try putting a hue/sat node after your skin color map and dialing the saturation down some.

The Carunkle (little patch of pink skin in the corners of the eye) I find that it often looks more natural is it fades gently into the white of the eye. Here is a mock up of kind of how I see the fur better blending around the mouth/nose. It’s a judgement call, but it just seems like such a hard stop on a body completely dominated by hair.

I included at the bottom a node setupo I use on hair sometimes to create a softer effect. It can be used to create santa hat soft hair, you certainly don’t want it that soft but it can give a much different feel to the hair as a whole, and used sparingly can help sell soft fur.

Keep going and post those eye nodes if it’s not top secret.


This is a snow leopard I made, the hair on the bottom of the chin has the tranparency mix used on it and you can see it makes it’s much softer looking.


I have had more than one person look at her and ask why she was dirty - they couldn’t tell it was fur from the less than full resolution previews. Or I have been asked why her fur was dirty. So, I’m hoping the lighter version will help with that, as well as soften the border between the fur and her skin around her lips. Here’s my appallingly simple node setup for her fur and hair:


Eyes. They are simple setups too. I like simple. The sclera uses the same SSS node setup I use for the skin, with tweaks, naturally. I didn’t capture a screenshot of that but can if you want.

The Cornea is a basic transparency/glossy mix.


I have another mesh that takes the reflection that I have turned into an emission so it shows up better in mixed lighting


Here is the node setup for the bump-mapped and textured iris.


Here is the latest development as I fine-tune Asherah’s fur (and the fur of every other Elf I render). The dark one looks dirty when viewed in anything smaller than full resolution. The light one looks very bright and saturated. I created another image-map that lightened the darker image-map to remove the dirty look, but kept some of the darker image’s qualities - or even enhanced them. The lighter patterns are easier to see than the other two choices, for instance. Here is a screenshot - left is the light version, middle is the compromise I rendered tonight, and right is the original dark. Thoughts are more than welcome. I also plan on adding a bit of variability to the fur length, have a few more strays and whatnot to increase realism.


Middle definitely looks the best. :slight_smile:

I’ve removed the combing of the fur on her face and am experimenting with it only moderately combed or directed, and shortened to still not look poofy. Will apply to the rest of the body as I go. Hopefully that will give me a more realistic look now that I’ve got the color of the fur set, and make it easier to add more variability to the fur. I’m not sure how much more variability I can put in around her face. I want it to look pretty tight - something you’d mistake for skin when viewed from a distance. I may slightly lengthen the area where the brows would be, and maybe put in a few whiskers in her eyebrows. I like that white soft fur on the tiger’s chin but probably won’t be able to emulate that with her. Maybe on the bottoms of her arms and backs of legs.

I think I may add some particle systems to put a very subtle subset of that white fur of yours in the front of her throat down her chest between her breasts, and on the bottom of her arms and back of her legs and inner thighs. Is the node-group you posted the same that produced the soft fur on the chin of your tiger? It should soften things up a lot and add a bit of diversity to the fur. I may also lengthen the current shoulder fur slightly and make it a little shaggier and similar on the back of her neck down her back and perhaps on the front of her legs and tops of her arms. I’m actually removing all the training on the fur and combing it again after adding some more settings to rough it up a little and give for more strays. I re-combed the fur on her face after adding a little more variability to it for a bit more strays and slight clumping, and where her brows would have been I lengthened the fur slightly, to give the illusion of brows without actual brows.

Here is a render in progress with the previous render png output on the right for comparison. I lightened the fur texture and shifted the hue a little to the yellow. I also found that the fur particles had lotsa doubles and removed those. And I applied a bit of randomizing, clump and whatnot to give more strays and make it seem more… furry.

I am having trouble finding a color profile that will display it in the same color on mobile devices and on computer screens. Mobile devices blow the saturation out very badly when it looks perfect on the screen. Since the ultimate destination for many of these images I’m producing will be as ebook-covers, that is definitely something that is concerning me. In this image, I shifted the hue to the yellow by 5, lightened it by 5 and desaturated by -15 and it still wasn’t enough. Better, but not there yet.


Latest render of Asherah the Elf with a touch of post-production to bring out fur detail a little better and to help the colors not get totally blown out when viewed on mobile devices. Still far from perfect - reminds me of the IE vs Firefox days of designing web-pages. Sad. Any-who… lighter fur, a touch more contrast in the fur pattern so the lighter streaks show up better. I’d have posted the 1600x2400 version but there is a fur combing aberration on her shoulder I need to tend to. :slight_smile:


hi, really great job so far!
I would move the fur closer to the lips & nose, maybe use a finer fur, but it looks empty in those areas, top lip hair even in some human females & certainly males is the norm.
maybe even fine hair on the bulb, less density & combed.
Also the eyes as awesome as they are seem to have the same texture. you should duplicate it & change a few settings to add more realism.

cool render.

Excellent suggestions. Funny - I had actually thinned the fur out over and around her mouth because the fur to flesh border was too stark. Open to more experimentation, of course.

I notice the eyes once and again - I guess I’ll have to grit my teeth and take care of it. Rotate and flip the iris textures to differentiate them a little.

Okay - the irises are now different… sort of. Flipped one of them. I also removed the reflection of the main light too and keyed up the emission of the reflection-map a little to make her eyes sparkle a little more realistically. I refined her fur more and think this Finished project is now finally… finished? Anyone? Incidentally, I desaturated this image so it didn’t look blown out so much on mobile devices. If anyone has any recommendation of making ONE image work fine on both PC screen and mobile screens, I’m all ears… and eyes. The last render was modified in post - which produced a few anomalies in the shadowed area. Since I liked the image otherwise, I tweaked the shaders heavily until my raw render approximated the previously posted image. As a result, the shadow on her nose plays MUCH nicer. Okay… I’m ready to explore more compositions with Asherah… I guess I can upload this into the first post of this thread now?