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Description
My very first little Blender scene. Ellie sitting on top of Blender's default cube.

This scene is sort of my 'exam' project for the first 40-50ish hours in Blender (and YouTube...). I've learned shading, rigging, posing, lighting, and a bit of sculpting in quick succession, and I'm quite happy with the results so far if I do say so myself.

So a quick breakdown of what's on display here. I can't (and don't want to) do sculpting and modeling myself, so the body model for Ellie was a premade model for DAZ 3D. The head was very close to Naughty Dog's original model, but the body was nowhere near, and required quite a bit of work to match to Ellie's actual proportions (based on her appearance in the birthday flashback in TLOU2). While I do have access to the original models from The Last of Us Part 1, those models aren't great for this kind of 3D modeling as they're very specifically made for a game engine. Among other things that means that Ellie's body doesn't actually exist under the clothes you see her wearing in game. The approach I used here gives her an actual body to work with, meaning she can wear pretty much anything in future scenes, and the body model is much more detailed than the game model. Her skin textures are also modified DAZ Gen. 9 textures, since the original game textures (even from the recent remaster) only cap out at 2k in resolution. Even then they look a bit blurry up close and lack any finer detail on her skin. Again, not very suited for high detail scene building like this. Getting her skin color right was a lot of trial and error, and I'm still not entirely sure if I got it right. For now it's close enough.

The hair, shirt, jeans, and shoes are all original assets from The Last of Us Part 1 with little to no additional work done on them. Look close and you can see the distinct difference in quality between her body and the clothing. In future iterations I plan on replacing her hair with Blender's hair physics, which allows the hair to better conform to the scene, and also allows Ellie to set her hair free from the pony tail for a change. I'd also like to create custom, better looking clothing for her. Look at the collar on that t-shirt. It's like half an inch thick! The shoes can be made to look surprisingly good though.

Couple of things that stand out (to me, at least); the rig on her hands is all kinds of wrong and I couldn't be bothered to fix it for this scene. As a result her fingers are in this weird curled up position that is very unnatural for this particular pose. Lessons for another day! Also, while I was working on her expression I began to notice that something about her appearance just looks off. Turns out that the official model doesn't actually use properly modelled eyes, but instead just uses the texture of an iris on the shape of an eyeball. In turn this causes the irises to appear larger than they should be. The model I'm using has actual depth to the pupil and the surrounding iris, which gives her eyes an entirely different look. Ironically, she's less recognizable because her eyes are 'too realistic'. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to approach that problem yet, because I do want to keep her as authentic as possible. Aside from the eyeballs itself, the eyelids also need a bit of work to match Ellie's eye shape. That might be enough to fix her appearance, we shall see.

Any tips, tricks, or constructive feedback is always welcome. I'm very eager to learn and get better!

Description
My very first little Blender scene. Ellie sitting on top of Blender's default cube.

This scene is sort of my 'exam' project for the first 40-50ish hours in Blender (and YouTube...). I've learned shading, rigging, posing, lighting, and a bit of sculpting in quick succession, and I'm quite happy with the results so far if I do say so myself.

So a quick breakdown of what's on display here. I can't (and don't want to) do sculpting and modeling myself, so the body model for Ellie was a premade model for DAZ 3D. The head was very close to Naughty Dog's original model, but the body was nowhere near, and required quite a bit of work to match to Ellie's actual proportions (based on her appearance in the birthday flashback in TLOU2). While I do have access to the original models from The Last of Us Part 1, those models aren't great for this kind of 3D modeling as they're very specifically made for a game engine. Among other things that means that Ellie's body doesn't actually exist under the clothes you see her wearing in game. The approach I used here gives her an actual body to work with, meaning she can wear pretty much anything in future scenes, and the body model is much more detailed than the game model. Her skin textures are also modified DAZ Gen. 9 textures, since the original game textures (even from the recent remaster) only cap out at 2k in resolution. Even then they look a bit blurry up close and lack any finer detail on her skin. Again, not very suited for high detail scene building like this. Getting her skin color right was a lot of trial and error, and I'm still not entirely sure if I got it right. For now it's close enough.

The hair, shirt, jeans, and shoes are all original assets from The Last of Us Part 1 with little to no additional work done on them. Look close and you can see the distinct difference in quality between her body and the clothing. In future iterations I plan on replacing her hair with Blender's hair physics, which allows the hair to better conform to the scene, and also allows Ellie to set her hair free from the pony tail for a change. I'd also like to create custom, better looking clothing for her. Look at the collar on that t-shirt. It's like half an inch thick! The shoes can be made to look surprisingly good though.

Couple of things that stand out (to me, at least); the rig on her hands is all kinds of wrong and I couldn't be bothered to fix it for this scene. As a result her fingers are in this weird curled up position that is very unnatural for this particular pose. Lessons for another day! Also, while I was working on her expression I began to notice that something about her appearance just looks off. Turns out that the official model doesn't actually use properly modelled eyes, but instead just uses the texture of an iris on the shape of an eyeball. In turn this causes the irises to appear larger than they should be. The model I'm using has actual depth to the pupil and the surrounding iris, which gives her eyes an entirely different look. Ironically, she's less recognizable because her eyes are 'too realistic'. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to approach that problem yet, because I do want to keep her as authentic as possible. Aside from the eyeballs itself, the eyelids also need a bit of work to match Ellie's eye shape. That might be enough to fix her appearance, we shall see.

Any tips, tricks, or constructive feedback is always welcome. I'm very eager to learn and get better!