Blind woman's curse

My kimono study project. I wanted to learn about japanese traditional clothing and produce an authentic kimono realtime model.
The main challenge I set for myself was accurately fitting (cut to measure on avatar by real-world standards), wrapping and folding the kimono within the simulation space of Marvelous Designer and achieve at the very least decent kitsuke (proper wear) in so doing.

The main topic was the kimono, and I wanted to be able to achieve great modularity of styles with my texture and material setups. Here are a few. They all use the same base maps, but with different types of materials utilizing a variety of mixing tiling textures.
I authored a rather large set of tiling textures, most in Substance Designer, but also Painter, Krita and Inkscape came of use. A couple textures were traced from public domain 19th century sources. I also used a couple fabric base substance files from Adobe.

I also folded and tied a nagoya-length obi into an o-taiko knot within MD as part of my initial challenge.

While not exactly necessary, it gave me some satisfaction to arrange a secondary UV set for for all the parts' tiling textures as the pieces would have been cut from the bolt of cloth. 

One of the things I worked on was a workflow for embroidered trim-sheets that let me 'comb' the direction and anisotropy of the satin stitches. I have more types of stitches to add in the future, as well as improving the general results, but it's a step! Embroideries and other trims were thus placed by a third UV set.

The entire assembly (juban, kimono, obi, obiage, obijime) ended up at 32k tris.
Main retopology effort was done in MD, I like doing it this way as it retains the objectively accurate UVs. Kudos to Maurizio for updating the MeshDataTransfer plugin at my request, it works like a charm!

To give some personality to my project I made the poster as an homage to Blind Woman's Curse (1970), the title calligraphy was ripped straight from it. It was rendered as-is within an UE5 level. I used images of Meiko Kaji as reference for my character, but achieving an accurate likeness was not a goal of the project.

I did however take the opportunity to dabble in some manual skin detail sculpting and texturing, as well as trying out rendering in Unreal.

The character was sculpted from a low resolution base mesh and textured by hand in Substance Painter. The eyes were grafted from the Metahuman project.

Made some detail maps. First time doing a detailed face like this! It kinda works I think!

I also painstakingly made a card-based hair asset, as well as brows and lashes, from texture sheets that I assembled and baked in Blender. Another first with this one. 

The style was based on the updo Meiko Kaji wears in the movie.

The hair mesh totals at 41k tris with all its detail layers. The brows are at 400.

My girl was given a little frown at the end

Meow! 
Other bits and bobs, such as the sword and backdrop cat were made rather hastily. The cat was sculpted from a sphere and hand-painted in an emissive material.


That's pretty much what I got this time.

I'll just drop in my Wrath to say boo!

Thanks for reading this far, hope you found something here interesting.
Good luck to everyone in the contest! :- )