It feels fantastic to have her re-wired and rendering like this. Her rig needs a few more adjustments and her facial blendshapes need a little work as well because I using some corrective shapes to 'fix' her cheeks and lips. Both are a little fuller now compared to the bonier feel they had before. Jeff Bedrick gave me a suggestion to raise her lips closer to her nose and it was a brilliant call as well. I'd seen her model for so long, that I just became accustomed to what she looked like. His feedback was right on, and you can certainly see the improvement in this image versus the older ones.

I've got a displacement on her hair and pink-top now since it felt like a better move than just using normal maps. Her wings don't really work yet - this is PhotoShop magic, but until I get further into animation, that won't be necessary.

Another major milestone is her skirts. There's a switch on her root control that will let me utilize any of the three skirts on her rig. She has a rigged skirt, a wrapped skirt, and a solved skirt using Maya's nCloth. I've run a few tests so far and have been pretty pleased with the nCloth skirt - hopefully I'll use it for all the rendering, but the other two are there for backup and in production purposes.

I finally got around to finishing the textures on Lilienne - though her wings are still a work in progress, I've added in the sculpted hair with normal maps from zBrush and laid out the UVs for her shoulder straps. I used the procedural cloth for the bump maps and I worked out a new trick to help myself fumbling through the creative process here. I wanted to work with colors and the bump map on her clothing, but I wanted to configuration of the cloth texture to be united between the color channel and the bump channel, but I wanted to the colors of course, to be separate. So I wired up all the connections for the attributes from the color to the bump and left the colors disconnected. Simple enough, but it was nice because it allowed me to experiment with a bunch of different options in only one place and see it's affects through IPR very quickly and never have to copy those values from one procedural map to another.

I had been advised on turning her shoulder coverings into simple nCloth shapes and solving them, then using the solved cloth as wraps on the model and I've looked at a couple other options and ended up coming back to this one in the end so that's what I've done.

I intentionally left a fairly large weave in on her shoulder pieces as they look sort of 'knitted' together. That was to help sell the illusion that she's really not that big. I'm not sure how shiny I want her clothing to be, but I'm using an anisotropic shader which is pretty soft at this point (the rim light in this scene has a very high intensity to help with the sub-surface scattering material for her skin). I can adjust for rendering if need be.

I also updated her model to fix the nose - if you look back you'll see some weird model behavior there and with the SSS material it was not looking good. This could be a good thing ... or a really bad thing. Because her Blendshapes have already been created, I can't simply use this one to wire back into the rigged mesh. I'll have to do a wrap which ...... will hopefully work. If not though, I have the original version still ... she'll just have a funky nose.