A realtime portrait
This project started as a zbrush demo for Jeffrey Wilson`s class on how to clean up a scanned head, done by my friends at 3dscanstore.
I decided to take it further and re-texture it, refine the details and change the sculpt a bit, hand sculpt the leather jacket and study realtime shaders/light/render.
The hair is cards with transparency.
I`m gonna probably post a breakdown tomorrow with more renders too, so stay tuned. If you have any questions about this project let me know in the comments.
Hope you like it.
Cheers
I decided to take it further and re-texture it, refine the details and change the sculpt a bit, hand sculpt the leather jacket and study realtime shaders/light/render.
The hair is cards with transparency.
I`m gonna probably post a breakdown tomorrow with more renders too, so stay tuned. If you have any questions about this project let me know in the comments.
Hope you like it.
Cheers
Replies
Wow, this is absolutely breathtaking. That slightly sad look on his face is really life-like.
Really love the skin shader. The SSS effect is looking great as well.
The only thing that looks slightly off are the really small hairs on his face + the ones sticking out from underneath his shirt. They gradient (bright grey at the root, dark at the tip) looks a bit too smooth and perfect. The small beard hairs look a bit stitched on rather than growing out from his skin but that's just my input
Looking forward to the breakdowns, awesome work!
if anything, i would also have to nitpick the facial hair. not the colours or placement, but rather how they interact with the surface below. they dont seem to be casting any shadows or anything which on closer inspection(as you always do with awesome art) they seem to be floating a bit.
Regarding the hair and shadows, I completly agree with that, but I`m having a hard time to set up this properly in marmoset. My max renders had this contact feeling but seems to be impossible to have this in Marmoset.
Anyways, since this is realtime based rendering, I understand that I still cannot compare to a Vray rendering for example.
But we will get there! Realtime rules
I`m gonna post the breakdown later today.
cheers
_Another image that I`ve rendered for the breakdown but there you go_
_BREAKDOWN_
-I started cleaning the raw data using the clay brush with alt pressed (zsub) and also using the Smoothing`s tweaked algorithm Hold shift, click and hold with the pen, release shift, and then you go. This mainly smooth out the surface without changing the overall surface too much. This also removes all those stars and triangles points that you get using dynamesh.
-I duplicate the head, set a morph target and then re-project all those raw details back. With the morph brush, I can JUST remove the needed stuff. Actually this process helps if I just want to get rid of something specific for instance. In this case I re-sculpted all the micro surface and some small forms to make it more interesting.
-I love sculpting pores and this kind of details. I don`t think that it`s boring or whatever. Maybe it`s because I`ve been doing it for the past years in traditional sculpture, mainly by hand without using alphas/stamps .
Anyways, this is a small breakdown of how I approach those details, variations and pores direction.
Standard brush with dragrect mode for those alphas, dam_standard to carve fine wrinkles and inflat to give it more weight/gravity feeling. For specific pores like positive details, I tend to use the dragdot mode and change the size of the brush manually.
-The jacket and t-shirt begun with a simple sphere dynamesh sketch, quick zbrush retopo, then into 3ds max to close the topology and UV it. Then, back to zbrush to sculpt and detail for normal map extraction.
-I`ve used two leather alphas for the jacket and then sculpted by hand those fine details. The image can tell by itself, just be careful about using the Inflat brush over textured surfaces. Usually, I go to a lower subdivision to inflat them.
For the textures I`ve jumped from zbrush to photoshop, using the same principle as used on cleaning up the mesh. The uv`s were done with UvMaster.
I`ve projected the textures into my polypaint, then painted it as I wanted, then exported and mixed with the raw data in photoshop. Also added some tattoos and blurried some details too. I exported a cavity map to bring back some details lost in the painting and used this map as my base for the gloss map. Having no spec inside deep wrinkles seems to help the contrast between the forms. I was going back and forth to marmoset so I could check the end result of what I was doing.
-I`ve got many questions about the hair.
Again, I tend to think like traditional, punching those hairs into a silicone head so I do it by hand, without plugins or scripts. It looks like would take forever to finish but you can place them faster than you think. Also, MUCH quicker than one by one with a needle.
Having many variations as possible is key here. Also, single hairs black or white tend to make things pop as they contrast with the others.
I paint my alpha cards on photoshop, duplicate it, boost the lightness and then copy to the alpha channel. Export them as TGA 32bits and you are ready to go.
I place them inside 3ds max and constantly check rendering and going to marmoset on my pre-set lighting studio. Color, specular and shadows tend to vary in these conditions so I`d do the hair by the end of the project.
If you are familiar with 3ds max, I use the bend and twist modifier to help me create directions for different hairs. I also use the layer system so I have more control for later adjustments.
For the difuse of those hairs, I use just a plain gradient or the painted hairs. It`ll depend on the color and varitions/limitations I`m going for.
-Regarding the skin shader and marmoset rendering, no big deal.
Just playing with those values, always using real photo reference.
I find myself setting the shader using only the sky light and then tweaking with the lights on. I have a gloss map, normal map, normal detail map (generic noise), translucency map, and a cavity map to help me breaking the spec.
If you have any questions about the shader, let me know. Those values can vary from different scales and light conditions.
-The leather jacket was also a skin shader based material. The Subdermis Scatter helps to break down the shadows a bit and also give more of the leather look to it.
I`ve extracted the normals from zbrush, generated a generic noise to use as a detail normal map, painted some gloss based on the cavity extracted from zbrush.
The difuse/Albedo was painted in zbrush and tweaked in photoshop. I also painted some black and white masks in zbrush to create variations on difuse and reflection.
That`s it. Hope it helps you to understand a bit my process.
Feel free to add or comment below. I`d love to hear your thoughts.
My best,
Glauco Longhi
My best,