Realistic Pichu

EDIT | November 15th, 2018, 12:53PM PDT 

First thing I addressed was the mouth, as that was the biggest point of contention for most people. I pushed the upper lips down to hide more of the teeth, adjusted the size of the lips, and adjusted the overall expression slightly.

Next was the fur density. Before we had a little over 1 mil, but I wasn't too happy with that. I doubled the density to over 2 mil. As a result I could reduce the thickness of the hairs to make it feel more real and less stuffed animal like. Easily visible around eye rims

And here's the whole face. I reduced clumping for the head fur on top of the increased hair density to hopefully make Pichu's fur look more soft.

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After seeing Warner Bros. creating realistic interpretations of Pokemon in their recent Detective Pikachu movie trailer, I decided to take my own take on it with Pichu! I spent about the past 2 days on this.

While I do think some of the Pokemon they showed in that trailer looked a bit too uncanny for my tastes, I really liked how Pikachu looked overall. I especially love how they fluffed him up with fur. It's what inspired me to experiment with Blender's hair particle system and apply it to a modified model of my Pichu I already had laying around. I wanted to try to recreate the style I saw in that trailer, so yes that includes some of that "uncanny" feeling of it looking a bit too real.

I've never really extensively used the Hair Particle system in Blender before. I've tinkered with it tons of times before, but I never used it to create a whole coat of fur. Considering this is my first time really doing something like this, I think it turned out pretty alright.

Now, with that being said, I likely won't continue using real hair particles in the future, especially for my MLP models. I might do a few tests with them, but there are still problems I have with the hair particle system, mainly due to how graphically intensive it is to render, and how much VRAM is uses. This render of this single Pichu used 2149.77 MB of VRAM out of 8GB on my dual GTX 1070 setup, and took 1 hour and 6 minutes to render at 2048x2048 at 512 samples. And a grand total of 1,290,845 individual hairs. This was all just for a little Pichu. I can't really see myself trying to work around all of the constant crashing and memory issues that I would have to deal with if I were to do this on a larger scale. Not to say it's not doable, but it's a lot of work I don't know if I'd find to be worth it, especially as someone who animates and needs relatively quick render times for each individual frame.

I also know that more detail could have been put into the skin texture detail (mostly seen around the rims of the eyes), and the iris texture itself. It's not something I had planned on spending a lot of time on, as this started out as an experiment on replicating how Pikachu's fur coat looked, and only afterwards did I decide to publish this.