This is a WIP progress report in trying to get a scan on the base of the ten24 reference images to a animateable and good looking 3d model in blender. testing some workflows and testing the pipeline, and learning the changes in blender 2.80

DAY 1 - 6 hours

Tried to get a 25 million scan from Agisoft Metashape (Photoscan) into blender for retopo was defintive overkill, basic editing was close to impossible, and retopo stuttered quite often. Defintive a ram problem on my side, but also shows some room of improvement  since those lags weren't constant.
Anyway resided using a 7million scan instead . Using the edge extrude method I was able to get the lowres mesh in less tan 6 hours. Longest time modeling wise was the ear, but I actually enjoy modeling these.

comparison 3d scan and retopolised model after 6 hours.

She looks actually much younger in the reference images, definitve something to investigae

Day 2 - 14 hours

Baked a normal map from the 25million mesh, and added an eye blink morph and added some eyebrows / animated a small test animation and rendered it

 DAY 3 / A few hours during the week
Wasn't able to keep continiously on it, so no time measure from here
Tweaking the normal map / and the eyes took the longest time. Instead of a tearline geometry, I experimented with an harsh ambocc shader. The iris is a mixture between a real image and some repetitve bark texture  wich has been eroded in gaea. Grow longer hair. Commbing is a bit frustrating in blender...I defintive need more training on this. Also added a basic specular map to the face. It's subtle, but a variing spec for the eyes mouth and nose give this thing a more fleshy apeareance. Also dialed back the makeup for the color map a bit

Day 3 Addendum
While playing with the hair, I tried something different. Planned was a wood like apeareance, but the hair shade didn't allow what I wanted, so I switched to gold. Note to myself, the intersect output of the hair info node is the V coordinate of the hair. Definitive will edit the color map a bit more, since I do like the more younge rlook.

this is how this frame looks in lookdef mode


Updated the gold texture for an animation

Day 4;
Removed the lower frequency of the normal map using frequency separation. Some fuirther work on the normal map. Added upper teeth, more hairs and some work on the eyes

Day 5;
Made the irises smaller and darker, some minor tweaks to the hair, and rendered with a higher sampling rate.
(denoiser flickering in hair)

DAY 7;
Mainly eye work. Some skin changement.Wished I could dial in a color value according to the light intensity,
simulating a slight blue shift in reflections, while having warmer colors in less reflective areas