these look great, cartoony, no uncanny valley at all
especially like the detail around the eyes!

Thanks! The eyelashes are geometry. I modeled them in. In my drawings they are very specific to each character and I feel they. Help identify each characters specific look. When I started doing these heads to match my drawing style I consciously chose to make sure that detail was represented. I'm very happy that it worked out as well as it did. I also want to 3d print them so I need a hair solution that is actually printable. And I always prefer details to actually be in the sculpt rather than rely on painting them in.

Would love to pick your brain about the shader setup you're using here! This is amazing work.

Any time. These are renders out of Zbrush. I can achieve the same type of effect more or less in any 3D package that has mental ray.

I could certainly tell they were from zbrush. Are these renders or screen grabs? I'm mainly interested in how you went about getting the skin shade you have. It's hard for me to tell how much information is painted in, and how much is shader.

Can't tell if you're relying on the wax material/preview or utilizing the sss. (it looks like a screengrab, but it could simply be an aliased render.)

I know that you're using a multi-shader for the spec, but not sure if you're utilizing that to help in other ways as well.


So yeah, any hints you can give as what the main points of what you did to get it to look that way would be sweet. :)