Best way to do eyebrows in Iray?

pepeschliemann

I'm mainly doing renders with skins without eyebrows. I've been using Oh My Brows BUNDLE Morphing Eyebrows by Redz studio and initially I was really satisified with it, but I've noticed that many times, the brows change shape and place when I save and load a document, and I just want to find a more reliable way of doing things. The way I see it, there's 3 options:

1) Alter the textures. My skin/bump textures are already customized, so it's not a big hurdle for me to customize them further. Only, it seems a bit cumbersome to have to make and apply new texture/spec/bump maps for the face every time you want to make a new set of eyebrows.

2) Using LIE. I'm using LIE for make up and stuff and it seems to work fine, even if the LIE editor is very very slow for some reason. I'm assuming it's not too hard to add LIE's to the bump and spec maps as well as the texture maps, although none of the LIE things I'm using right now seem to go beyond the diffusion map.

3) Using decals. I am using Iray for renders so this should work. The fact that they seem easy(?) to move about is probably a plus for adjusting them for different characters. I'm assuming you can do bump and spec maps for these as well (but not displacements, as I understand it). One con is that Iray rendering is slow for me so adjusting them little by little and waiting for the preview render to show how they're placed will probably be kind of frustrating.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to ponder this, so rather than running a gamut of experiments, I was wondering if there's an established best practice, and what that might be for this particular use case? 

ChangelingChick

For the morphing brows moving and changing shape-- if you have a conformer on something with a custom morph that has *not* been saved as a morph asset in a scene, when you close DS and reopen that scene, it very often will not still conform to the custom morph. Even though morphs are saved within a scene, you still need to save them out as morph assets so that when everything loads in, those custom morphs are transferred to the conformers.

Using LIE-- yeah, that's what I do. LIE is texture based, not node-based so the channel it's in doesn't matter. If you make a mask, you can use the same one for every texture and just change the color on it. Or you can alter the textures. If you only have one eyebrow look you want to use, no reason not to. 

pepeschliemann

ChangelingChick said:

For the morphing brows moving and changing shape-- if you have a conformer on something with a custom morph that has *not* been saved as a morph asset in a scene, when you close DS and reopen that scene, it very often will not still conform to the custom morph. Even though morphs are saved within a scene, you still need to save them out as morph assets so that when everything loads in, those custom morphs are transferred to the conformers.

Thank you - that's most likely my issue with oh my brows. As for the LIE stuff, could you script it so you can apply the various maps (diffusion, glossy, bump, top coat etc.) in one click?