Introducing Kurenai Ashikaga *

Conception: Kurenai: What is that?
It's my lighting set up to show off my subjects.
Kurenai: You're experimenting on me?
Er... sort of?
Kurenai: You shall die for your insolence.
But... I only want to make you look pretty...
Kurenai: Oh? Hm... you may live then.
Phew...

Method:
XPS: Load model, open Material editor.
Blender: Import model, smooth meshes, remove doubles. Select mesh, copy and paste node set up to selected mesh, use Material editor to assign textures. Repeat for all meshes. Switch to Rendered Viewport. Tinker around with textures for skirt. Go back to default. Investigate backface textures... choose 'Set From Faces' option. Check. Save.
XPS: Load a pose, customary tinkering (minimal). Save pose.
Blender: Import pose. Adjust camera, lighting rig and render parameters. Check again for inconsistencies. Render. Notice small problems... Find meshes which add to the issues; hide them. Enter Sculpt mode to make adjustments to collar. Double check. Render.

Commentary: Still pretty much housebound and it's Christmas. Not exactly a lot to do in all honesty. Given circumstances it is yet another day on the calendar. Health issues don't really account for calendar dates....

That aside, Kurenai! I'd always found the costume to be rather striking. So I thought it would be nice to add something different to the model library to play around with.
Kurenai: Are you sure you're not experimenting with me?
Er... yes. I experiment with your clothing, especially the skirt. That kept coming out funny for some reason. Actually, I had a few problems with assigning textures. Material editor is handy, but occasionally there are discrepancies. This had a few which I had to find out to get the model looking correct in Blender. One particular aspect was... backfacing textures.  That along with Rachel's dress (or skirts in general) are the bane of my life.
Rachel: But I thought Wardrobe is good at its job now?
They've regressed.
Rachel:  
Kurenai: Who is this? Does she need killing?
No, she doesn't. She needs Wardrobe to fix her dress. Usual internet search for answers led me to play around in the Shading/UV tab and the options for normals there. Originally after the normal set up of textures in the skirt node set up (DragonLord720's cloth node set up) it was really dark. Flipping normals (sounds like an insult) didn't work, but the 'Set From Faces' option did make it look more normal. And I still have no idea how these things work but at least the correct colour was now showing. Still looks a bit off to me, but my further tinkering didn't manage to do anything of note.

With respect to the background colour... it's an attempt to play around with colour after watching the Understanding Color video on the Blender Guru channel. With the outfit having strong red and blues, I thought maybe green would aid this piece. Not sure how it worked out...

Going forward, I can think of at least another idea to use Kurenai. Probably not any time soon due to my whimsical nature. I've come to the point (a while ago actually) of jotting down ideas so I don't forget them, especially after forgetting what the idea I had for Lei Wulong, Brad Wong and Shun Di was (but no Shun Di model as far as I'm aware). As it is, there's a stack of them I can go back to when my current whims are fulfilled and no new ones crop up; plus the supposedly ongoing series like Passion and Rachel's photoshoot --
Rachel:  
There, there. And Christie's pole dancing to complete as well. Morning after too for that matter. Most of those are skill limitations which is why they've stalled.
Kurenai: Her crying annoys me. Are you sure she doesn't need killing?
She doesn't. No one around here needs killing.
Kurenai:  

Credits:
Kurenai Ashikaga model courtesy of SSPD077
Pose courtesy of SSPD077 
Node set ups:
Basic node set up courtesy of DragonLord720
Cloth node set up by DragonLord720
Eye node set up by Hypster83
Skin node set up by Hiddenus
Tools: 
Blender 2.79
XNALara Posing Studio 11.8
Assets/Copyright:
Koei Tecmo
SSPD077

Render time: 58m 13s
Resolution: 1080x1920
Sampling: 4096
Other info: N/A

Date of completion: 25th December 2017

P.S. Had quite a few issues which I just couldn't quite fix. Scraps.