[WIP] - UE5 - Ryan Gosling: Drive

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  de_cbble polycounter lvl 7

  Dec 6 2025

  Some overarching goals: Quality character piece, learn Marvelous, use strand hair, and use Unreal Engine for the medium. As you'll see, a lot more goals were added onto these eventually.
  
  Chronologically, it's a mess, so I'll try doing sections to make it coherent.
  Starting from the beginning, I'll post the sculpt I submitted for school so we can all laugh at it:

  
  
  

  A year or two later I dusted it off, slapped on a new basemesh. The one I eventually used was by Tom Parker, who interestingly also based it off Ryan's appearance in Blade Runner 2049. I marveled at how he achieved his likeness, but I projected my sculpt onto it, knuckled down and then spent many hours refining it. I also sought some feedback from a local lecturer which helped a ton.
  
  Among many likeness Youtube tutorials, one technique I gleaned that worked for me was to rapidly turn on and off Spotlight to be able to sculpt the 'impression' rather than trying to match exactly the shape for every photograph or screenshot (though I see some sculpt masters on Youtube do this).
  
  It got a step closer than where I began, but it wasn't enough. I then bought a face pack from TexturingXYZ, VFace #89 Oleh, and started texture work. I did basic noise with Noisemaker in Zbrush first. I then wrap the VFace model, projected to my mesh, took the textures into Substance+Photoshop, and painted, layering on stuff to get more variation. I knew Ryan in Drive was a very tired man since he always worked night jobs, so I went a bit heavier on the eye circles.
  Zbrush evolution:
  I simultaneously brought the head into the Unreal Metahumans sample project to use the lighting for lookdev of the head sculpt. With real rendering powers, I immediately saw how far off I was with the sculpt, and I think the progress from there was very rapid. I was surprised myself. What people say about getting it in engine ASAP must be true, I recommend doing so. It looked correct in ZBrush but not in Unreal.
  Thanks to JHill's Youtube videos, I ripped out eyes from Metahuman, roughly adjusted their eye shells to fit my character, and placed it in.
  Unreal evolution:
  
  The rightmost sculpt stage in the Unreal shot above is around the 1/3 mark of the changes I made since.
  Also, you can already see it above, but I will circle back to hair at a later post.
  
  TL;DR: Sculpting likeness is very hard. Even after this process I can only hope I got better at it.
  I think that's it for now, I'll probably talk about clothing next.
  

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