(Re)Introducing Christie in a qipao (Cos049)

Conception: Continuing the laziest thing I could do!  

Method: Load model in XPS to use Material editor.
Import model in Blender, remove doubles, smooth meshes, assign nodes and textures, import a pose, adjust, adjust background and camera, render.

Commentary: You okay there, Christie? "I'm fine. I can do more if you want." I'll keep that in mind. At least this was fairly simple with a couple of oddities.

ssidey makes some brilliant modelling poses which I haven't really used much (as far as I can remember). I did have to tinker with the pose though as the angles for the shoulder came out wrong (bone names I imagine), so I'm not sure how well I managed to adjust it to match the original conception. This was what I was going for. What was wrong, and becoming more prevalent, are the eyeballs' angles. Her left eye was off in a different direction entirely which can't be explained by different bone names; it just seems to be a quirk with coordinates or something of the sort for handling angles in Blender, I assume. One advantage I've noticed is that the mesh for the dress doesn't distort as much as it does in XPS when moving and rotating it; I would assume it's to do with weight painting but can't be sure. The dress clips into Christie's legs originally --- "It wasn't comfortable." But by rotating the highest bone it lessened the clipping so it looks like it's hanging in front of her as it should do.

The second was the initial render showed the dress coming out slightly wrong, which I assume is to do with the backface dress textures interfering. For the second render you (yes, you) see above, I hid the dress backface mesh and it comes out fine. Not the first time these backface textures seem to affect a render even after removing doubles. Odd.

The third is more interesting, I think. You (yes, still you) may have seen my attempted renders of Christie in this dress (technically a different model), and I've mentioned there's an issue with the hair texture. This remained the case with this. Now, usually smoothing the mesh helps the render come out better; not so for the hair. I chose the flat shading option previously, but this time it seems confirmed. I also added a Subdivision Surface modifier to all the hair meshes for this. I'm not sure if it helps a great deal, but it does seem to indicate an issue with the original texture or how such a texture is applied to the mesh. It doesn't seem to be as bad as previous attempts though. "We still need a better hair stylist." I agree.

Credits:
Christie model courtesy of zareef
Pose by ssidey
Node set ups:
Basic node set up (including hair) by DragonLord720
Cloth node set up by DragonLord720
Eye node set up by Hypster83
Skin node set up by Hiddenus
Tools:
Blender 2.78c
Assets/Copyright:
Koei Tecmo for Christie

24th August 2017

P.S. Having discovered zareef's pose converter I feel I ought to come back to this and do it again... (15th December 2017)