Made for last weeks render challenge with the theme “Días de los Muertos”
Took the opportunity to try my hand at sculpting, retopo and texture painting which are three things I have very little experience with but want to get better at. Also decided to try out Ucupaint which I have heard a lot of good things about!
Sculpt (left) and retopo (right). I didn’t have a reference but I had a sculpting tutorial running on my second monitor and basically went chapter by chapter just following the techniques but with my own imagined face.
I went with closed eyes at first but changed that during the final retopo adjustments.
Texture painting was quick and dirty because I knew that a lot of it would be obscured enough by hair to not matter too much. The procedural cracked paint texture also helped a lot with hiding the unrefined painting job.
Hair was pretty straight forward albeit a bit annoying to groom. I used maybe a handful of actual hair curves as guides and tweaked the hair modifiers to add volume and frizziness. The hair material is just a Principled Hair BSDF. I used the same approach for the eyebrows.
I tried using the same approach for the lashes but it was just too cumbersome so I ended up just making a simple geometry nodes setup for it instead.
To fill out the scene I made a rose generator.
And then a rose band generator.
I also made some accessories based on some pictures I saw when looking for make-up references: jewels and a sort of crown.
After placing some rose bands I made a 2-light setup for a spooky mood. It was at this point I decided to just leave the eyes as they are and consider the piece done.
Viewport render
