The white hair isn't a must either, only the Order of Our Martyred Lady dye their hair white in honor of Saint Katherine, the founder of that particular chapter.

They can have a variety of hair styles, though they are almost always on the shorter side and the bob is the most popular one. Some shave their heads, others have pixie cuts.

I need the bookmark function so much. 😭I'd love to see a breakdown of the Designer workflow for the painterly texture as well!

Oh yes youtube is indeed a treasure trove for blender tutorials. I really should learn a bit more about the shader nodes, but I'm so used to doing materials in Substance that I think I'll just go that route for faster results. 😅

Thanks!
I do plan to add a bit more wear and tear to the pieces so that the space will look more old and atmospheric. 😄

If you read this far, thank you so much! The full thesis can be found here, although it is unfortunately only in Finnish. urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:a...

I wanted to create a dynamic skin shader now that I had found a 3-dimensional skin color lookup table. For this I used Unreal Engine 4. The shader samples hemoglobin and melanin from the lookup table, and uses hemoglobin blend masks so you can change the blush patterns for different emotions

The lookup table by Donner et al. however didn't take into account different blends of melanin. So the ideal skin color lookuptable would have 3 axes: hemoglobin & melanin amounts, and melanin blend. Djelly did just that with a simulation based on measured values:
half4.xyz/index.php/20...

In the paper A Practical Appearance Model for Dynamic Facial Color Craig Donner and others explored this idea of a lookup table for skin tones, based on measurements of hemoglobin and melanin amounts in skin. This was an excellent reference for painting skin.

reality.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/ski...

I painted rough blend maps for hemoglobin. At this point I started to wonder about choosing skin tones, and if there exists a physically accurate color palette of all possible skin tones with different hemoglobin and melanin combinations. Turns out others have also thought about this problem.

In Substance Painter I worked in steps corresponding to the physiological structure of skin, with hemoglobin, melanin and absorption layers. I tried to do as much as possible with procedural noises and masks, but some hand painting was inevitably needed.

The different tertiary details were all on separate layers so I could adjust their strength during the sculpting process. Once the sculpting was done I exported the layers as displacement maps. With a bit of editing in Photoshop I had usable height maps for texturing, with details on separate layers

Nearly all of the surface details were sculpted in Zbrush, with the aid of the noise generator and an alpha for pores. With the help of morph target and morph brush I could paint in the noise patterns only where needed.

Since my thesis was about texturing and creating the shader I decided to use the demoHeadFemale model from Zbrush as a base, instead of sculpting everything from scratch. I did modify the model a little bit, such as editing the topology and breaking symmetry hear and there.

Absolutely gorgeous! I need more vampire art in my life 🙏

For the concept I researched a lot of old norse clothing, jewellery and everyday items.

I tried to lean more towards historically accurate clothing, weapons etc, even though in the end the character is just a figment of my imagination.

I wanted to create a semi-realistic imagining of a valkyrie, as in, what would actual Norse people have imagined a valkyrie to look like 1000 years ago?