What do I do with these?
High-fidelity Blender scene files can be extremely educational when analyzed. Including mesh structure, material construction, particle hair settings, etc - there's a lot that can be learned by poking around.
Practically I think they serve as wonderful lighting practice. I'd love to see you use them to experiment with all kinds of lighting. You could practice studio setups, dramatic lighting, or put the portraits into environments for cinematic stills.
If you like big challenges I'll suggest 2:
- You could try converting these hi-res portraits to a game-ready versions. This might require lo-res retopo and map baking, but would definitely require hair-conversion. I know it'd be fun though!
- You could also try rigging and animating the portraits. If you wanted to rig the whole head for talking, the only problem is none of them have teeth or tongues...so you'd need to add those. Alternatively you could focus on isolated rigging tasks like only rigging the eye or only the mouth. This kind of challenge is not for the faint-hearted!
Technical Notes
- Each .blend is packed with all necessary external files, namely image textures. You could unpack them for opening in Photoshop, Krita. Otherwise you can view / edit them within Blender's image editor.
- They're dense files between 320-370 MB each. If you want to use the assets in lighting / compositing exercises without modifying them, I recommend linking their "BUST" collection rather than appending. You'll save a lot of file space that way.
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The lessons are very educational, clear and well documented. Kent's (the teacher) work is done so that everyone can understand. It's really well done.
Awesome work