A Hairy Situation

I'm definitely a child of the modern age. I want my gratification and I want it now.

Working on my little project has tried my patience to the extreme. Not because it's overly difficult (though it has been a challenge). The issues is that solving a problem doesn't end the problem. Either the solution needs to be put into effect (over and over and over, in a never ending cycle) or the solution just creates a new problem.

Take hair, for example.

I'm not an artist. I feel like a total nut job thinking I can possibly do what I want to do with my complete lack of any skill. Logically, I have no reason to feel this way. The choices I've made turn out a pretty decent product, so I should just be happy. But I can't help feeling like a fraud. Especially considering how fast I can do it. Still. Not an artist.

I get around that limit by cheating. I'm cool with that, because I created my cheats--I stood on the shoulders of others to get there, but they are still mine. 

The cheating has it's drawbacks. Hair being one of them. All of the hair I can use is trying very hard to be realistic. I'm trying very hard to something other than realistic. Pretty much the opposite. Photo-realism is hard, and not really worth the effort, IMO. At least not without the big bucks to justify all of the work. I'd like to get paid for this effort, but that's not why I am doing is. I don't expect to get paid. Rather the opposite, in fact.

Unfortunately, the hair looked fake when I made it look fake. You'd think that would be a good thing, but it's not.

Top right, although all of the hair suffers from the same problem. Black hair just hides it better.

It doesn't look like hair. It looks like pile of clay. I had hopped to avoid having to mess too deeply with the hair, because I didn't think I could solve the issues. In photo real mode that hair is doing a lot of tricks to make it look far, far different. But those tricks don't respect the the quirks of the render engine I'm using--or maybe the engine does respect the tricks. Likely the latter, given how basic the tricks are. I had hoped the way I was creating the NPR would cover for the multitude of sins of the hair. Like a hat.

Lazy as I am, I was willing to let it go at that, but a third party review found it wanting. So, hair 3.0:

Version 3 is basically a compromise between versions 1 and 2. I think it looks much better, but then I was okay with version 2, so what do I know? It's stuff like this that kicks the legs out from under my confidence. I'm just not qualified to judge the quality of this stuff. I keep telling myself that it doesn't have to be good if gets the point across. I just don't know that it's getting the point across.

All of the work I've put into it, I just want it to be done. Of course, it's not. Far from it. It's not that I mind the work. I actually enjoy it. But it's so much. Once I "finish" something, or find a solution, I can't manage to pat myself on the back before I realize how much more I have left to do.