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Description
Second little tryout scene I made in Blender. Ellie with the pistol she uses in the game.

I like to think of this as version 2 of Ellie's model. Lots of tiny things were fixed, added, or improved. Most of them technical, a couple visual.

First of all, I wasn't quite happy with Ellie's appearance. The model was close, but her face lacked the detail that made Ellie 'Ellie'. So I went back to DAZ to make the necessary changes to her face, and particularly her eyelids and surrounding area. There's still room for improvement, but that's mostly details that most people wouldn't even notice. So for now it's good enough. While I was at it I also tinkered with the eyes themselves. Iris and pupil size are about as close to the original as they're going to get, and I got her eye color much closer to what it should be. However, there is a big difference in eye geometry between the official model and this much more detailed one, so it will probably always look a little different.

Hair, eyebrows and eyelashes have been recolored to be more accurate. In the long term (probably for V3) I want to give her physical hair so I can be much more flexible with how she wears it, and how gravity affects it. Right now it's a static mesh that could be rigged, but even the original animators for the game didn't bother much with this. If you pay attention to the cutscenes you'll notice that Ellie's hair does move, but it rarely obeys the laws of gravity .

A bigger change is that I had to change the skin texture. For the V1 model I used one of DAZ' basic female skin textures, but these are very detailed textures for middle aged women. They look a bit out of place on a teenager and aged her up considerably, so I went and found an actual teenage skin texture to use instead. I haven't touched the freckles on her face, but they do deserve another pass at some point. They don't quite pop as much as I'd like them to.

I added in the sleeves of her undershirt for the sake of completion (and because I'm still figuring out what to do about the scar on her arm...), but all of her clothes are just placeholders from the game. They are way too low quality to use in any serious capacity (if you zoom in you can count the bloody polygons). For the V3 model I'd like to replace the clothes with high resolution meshes, maybe even with physical cloth simulation. We'll see.

Lastly, on the visual front, the pistol is also a placeholder from the game. It works well enough for a demo render like this, but both the mesh and especially the texture are too low quality for any up close shots I might want to make in the future. In the long run it will be replaced with a high poly model of a Beretta 70.

On the technical side of things, I'm happy to say that her rig is now fully feature complete. The body rig is taken care of by a Rigify rig, converted from the original DAZ3D rig. The face is controlled with a FaceIt rig, which gives an insane amount of control over the expressions and makes them much more lifelike than I could ever do manually. Even with all that control though, it is surprisingly difficult to give a character a believable emotion. (Expression) posing really is a skillset in and of itself, and one that I hope to improve as time goes by.

For now I'm probably done with Ellie for a little while. I'm gonna need Joel for pretty much any scene I want to be making, so I hope I can get similarly good results for his model as well.

As usual, any tips, tricks or constructive feedback is always welcome. I'm always looking to improve!

Description
Second little tryout scene I made in Blender. Ellie with the pistol she uses in the game.

I like to think of this as version 2 of Ellie's model. Lots of tiny things were fixed, added, or improved. Most of them technical, a couple visual.

First of all, I wasn't quite happy with Ellie's appearance. The model was close, but her face lacked the detail that made Ellie 'Ellie'. So I went back to DAZ to make the necessary changes to her face, and particularly her eyelids and surrounding area. There's still room for improvement, but that's mostly details that most people wouldn't even notice. So for now it's good enough. While I was at it I also tinkered with the eyes themselves. Iris and pupil size are about as close to the original as they're going to get, and I got her eye color much closer to what it should be. However, there is a big difference in eye geometry between the official model and this much more detailed one, so it will probably always look a little different.

Hair, eyebrows and eyelashes have been recolored to be more accurate. In the long term (probably for V3) I want to give her physical hair so I can be much more flexible with how she wears it, and how gravity affects it. Right now it's a static mesh that could be rigged, but even the original animators for the game didn't bother much with this. If you pay attention to the cutscenes you'll notice that Ellie's hair does move, but it rarely obeys the laws of gravity .

A bigger change is that I had to change the skin texture. For the V1 model I used one of DAZ' basic female skin textures, but these are very detailed textures for middle aged women. They look a bit out of place on a teenager and aged her up considerably, so I went and found an actual teenage skin texture to use instead. I haven't touched the freckles on her face, but they do deserve another pass at some point. They don't quite pop as much as I'd like them to.

I added in the sleeves of her undershirt for the sake of completion (and because I'm still figuring out what to do about the scar on her arm...), but all of her clothes are just placeholders from the game. They are way too low quality to use in any serious capacity (if you zoom in you can count the bloody polygons). For the V3 model I'd like to replace the clothes with high resolution meshes, maybe even with physical cloth simulation. We'll see.

Lastly, on the visual front, the pistol is also a placeholder from the game. It works well enough for a demo render like this, but both the mesh and especially the texture are too low quality for any up close shots I might want to make in the future. In the long run it will be replaced with a high poly model of a Beretta 70.

On the technical side of things, I'm happy to say that her rig is now fully feature complete. The body rig is taken care of by a Rigify rig, converted from the original DAZ3D rig. The face is controlled with a FaceIt rig, which gives an insane amount of control over the expressions and makes them much more lifelike than I could ever do manually. Even with all that control though, it is surprisingly difficult to give a character a believable emotion. (Expression) posing really is a skillset in and of itself, and one that I hope to improve as time goes by.

For now I'm probably done with Ellie for a little while. I'm gonna need Joel for pretty much any scene I want to be making, so I hope I can get similarly good results for his model as well.

As usual, any tips, tricks or constructive feedback is always welcome. I'm always looking to improve!