Just finished a big project. Trying to do photo realism in inkscape. I think it worked. I would appreciate your feedback!

The reference is here
Please check out my deviant art

OMG that is amazing!!
How in the world? You must have run into some memory/performance issues, with so many gradients, and presumably nodes and blurs -- how did you handle that?

Wow, that is just an incredible image! For me, it would be a supreme effort just to recreate the little princess crown.

Congratulations on such an outstanding effort!

Actually I used very few gradients. For the softshading I used blur a lot. The performance hits were only from my laptop over heating, I am pretty sure. A lot of times Inkscape would crash, but again I think that has to do with my laptop overheating. The end result was a 9mb file, the hair was I believe > 7000 objects with many nodes per object. To tell you the truth I am rather impressed that it was able to handle all that. I did the hair in a separate file, and because there is currently no real method to make photo realistic hair in inkscape, I resorted to using the calligraphy tool to draw each strand (thank god for my tablet). Ultimately it just took patience. Thank you for your kind words!

Nice (:
With big works like that, inkscape crashes too much on my notebook

...because there is currently no real method to make photo realistic hair in inkscape...

I've heard that Live Path Effects can be used fairly successfully to make hair. I haven't learned how to use LPE yet though, so I can't really recommend it. But you might want to have a look?

Somewhere I saw a tutorial on making hair with Inkscape, but it will take me a while to find it. If I do, before this thread gets too old, I'll post a link.

I think your image has impressed and inspired me to take another step into learning Inkscape. I have been in sort of a slump lately, and not sure what to try next. But maybe it will be LPE?

Thanks for sharing your work. I think it will inspire others as well.

brynn wrote:

...because there is currently no real method to make photo realistic hair in inkscape...

I've heard that Live Path Effects can be used fairly successfully to make hair. I haven't learned how to use LPE yet though, so I can't really recommend it. But you might want to have a look?

Somewhere I saw a tutorial on making hair with Inkscape, but it will take me a while to find it. If I do, before this thread gets too old, I'll post a link.

I think your image has impressed and inspired me to take another step into learning Inkscape. I have been in sort of a slump lately, and not sure what to try next. But maybe it will be LPE?

Thanks for sharing your work. I think it will inspire others as well.

I found tutorials on live effects. They are pretty good for black hair where you have very few shades, but for something like this where you have many hues of hair strands and shadows in very specific spots, it is tough to replicate with live effects. I did actually use live effects on the crown just so I wouldn't have to duplicate the white circle too many times. The tutorials I have tried to make hair used pattern along path, stich sub-paths, and one on interpoliation. In all of these methods, you can make many strands very easily, but you have very little control over the strands and even harder to control the color of each strand. Overall, I believe for my project that doing each strand was both easier, less taxing on my pc (those live effects take a lot of cpu work), and it looks better.

The tutorials that I looked at were
http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2FView%3Fdocid%3Ddhs3vfzq_131cm2t24&langpair=es|en&hl=en&ie=UTF8 This one uses interpolation, I didn't try this one too thoroughly.
http://chrisdesign.wordpress.com/2007/12/29/drawing-hairs/ - This is the one that looks decent on black hair, but still if you look at the hair ends, it is a little strange. Uses the pattern along path. I think this is the best way to make hair without a tablet.
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Paths-LivePathEffects-StitchSubPaths.html - Not the exact one, but uses the stitch sub-paths technique

RM. wrote:Nice (:
With big works like that, inkscape crashes too much on my notebook

Mine crashed a lot as well. I just got into the routine of saving after nearly every addition.

This is outstanding, really. And like brynn those pieces push my motivation a lot. Thanks for posting it (for linking the hair tuts as well).

Polli

You can always ask how he did this.
http://Maddrum.deviantart.com/art/Megan-Inkscape-134931482

RM. wrote:You can always ask how he did this.
http://Maddrum.deviantart.com/art/Megan-Inkscape-134931482

I am pretty sure he used the tablet. Or so it says on this "what's new in .47" page http://inkscape.org/screenshots/index.php?lang=en
From the small section it sounds like we used almost the exact same process.

Polli wrote:This is outstanding, really. And like brynn those pieces push my motivation a lot. Thanks for posting it (for linking the hair tuts as well).

Polli

I am really glad you like it!
You guys inspire me to keep making art with your kind comments! Thank you.