Looking back, it seems I have a tendency to pose my model looking at its hands, which I want to demo some new feature on the hands. I used it at the bottom of really early scrap (warning: seriously ugly) and again when struggling with initially retopologizing the model's hands (caution: not as bad as the other one, but not that great either).

But hey, not a bad amount of improvement for a about a year's worth of changes, huh?


Getting the nail's shading the way I wanted proved challenging. I spent way too long trying to create adapt a technique used to create brushed metal looks, using anisotropy values generated through a mutilated Brownian Noise map, to get tiny grooves like a real nail would have. The results ranged between imperceptible to unconvincing with the grooves being to big and all running in the same direction regardless of the spatial orientation of the nail itself. I ended up dumping the whole mess and going with a simple near-back (slightly blue) shader with a very nearly white glossy highlight with simple, non-mapped anisotropy. The slightly off colors combine at the edges of the highlights to make to tint it noticeably blue. I tweaked BRDF setting to get it just the way I wanted

Then, I turned on all the lights and realized even the simple effect was completely wrecked all my BRDF tweaking.


Still, it's wasn't as much trouble as when I tried to come up with a shader for the black "glove" markings for the forearms.