Making of Child's Nightmare by Maciej Kotlinski, Poland

(Of course to set up final pose I needed a teddy bear. It's just a simple mesh, modelled directly in desired pose). Rigging of boy was very quick-and-dirty. I didn't care for artefacts on arms, shoulders and forehands (they were covered with pyjama), but fingers were terrible. Also I didn't set up soft body carefully and in some places mesh was extremely stretched. In this moment I had two ways to choose from – correcting and extending rigging and tweaking soft body simulation (and calculating it few times) or applying pose and soft body to meshes permanently and doing corrections manually, by editing or sculpting. First way is of course more professional and better if you want to reuse models, render in few different poses, animate and so on. But I've needed only one picture and I didn't have too much time, so I've just applied modifiers to meshes and corrected details of fingers and pyjama in sculpt mode. (It's always good to have backup of original meshes in different file, or on other layer. And it's also important to assign uvs to the mesh before applying modifiers, later it would be much more complicated).


Details - Sculpting

I've used blender's sculpt mode to add details of boy's face – expression, wounds around his mouth, details of ears and so on. Unfortunately blender's performance with dense mesh is low (and my pentium-m laptop didn't help), so I deleted all parts of boy's body that were covered with pyjama, to free some CPU time.


Stitches

I’ve used bezier curves to form them and then I used bevel option to skin them with additional bezier circle. It's very fast and easy, especially when you know that you'll need to tweak shape and thickness later. I've used the same method to create stitch on teddy bear's button-eyes.


Eyes

I've used here well known method with two balls – one inside with colours, textures and SSS, and second on top, transparent, with mirror reflections and specular reflections. To control eyes position and to be sure that I won't make boy cross-eyed while posing, I've added simple object that eyes are tracking and I used it to pose eyes.


Hair




Here I've used blender's static particles. I've been controlling haircut with Bezier curves. I've duplicated boy's head twice and set it's copies to emit particles. One with minimal randomness, and second with more randomness (but still minimal, because I didn't want to lose control over them). To create eyelashes I've used emitters hidden in eyelids, also controlled by curves. I used weight painting to control hair length and density.

Here are settings of particles (you can also see that I was saving cpu time anywhere it was possible):

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