For those not familiar, this is Kara, the MC of the book I’ve written. (Like, an actual book! It’s got words and everything!)
I’ve made many attempts over the years to capture her likeness, and though I’ve gotten close before, there’s always been something not quite right. But this time, I think that I’ve finally got her out of my head.
I recently migrated to a new base mesh (Shout out to the Blender Foundation for their excellent base mesh pack!), which means we have new everything. A completely new sculpt, new UVs, new textures, new hair… the only things that I’ve reused are the clothing, because they’re good enough just to get some renders out there.
In theory, she should now be set up to use over and over with relative ease. She’s also got a whole body now, which means I can rig her if I want, and be a little more creative with my renders, which is good news for book marketing (people do love character art!)
I plan to do new versions of all of the main characters, and post updated version for each book. (Kara looks a little different in Book 2, so I will of course update her look at some point in the future.)
Anyway, here she is. I think this is easily the best portrait I’ve done to date, but who knows… Honestly, I’ve been staring at her for so long, I might have gone completely blind to her
Very good work. She looks real! How are you doing displacment details in blender? I find it tricky to work at the higher poly counts. Only small crit is the neck length and width seem a tad too large.
For skin details, I use a displacement map from Texturing xyz, which I clean up a bit in Substance Painter and also paint a mid value grey over everything where I don’t have any displacement info, which is basically everything that isn’t the face itself. I then split that into the 3 RGB channels in photoshop.
In Blender, I’ll start with my main mesh, and apply 2 or 3 levels of multires to lock the sculpt in. I’ll then duplicate it, and add another 3 or 4 levels of subdivision with multires, as well as add a displacement modifier for each of those RGB channels. Once the values are dialed in, I’ll apply the multires and the displacement, giving me a mesh with actual displaced geometry.
On the OG mesh, I’ll then add however many levels of multires I added to the duplicate. I then use the ‘reshape’ option by shift selecting the duplicate mesh, and then the OG.
Assuming they both have the same vertex count, this should then transfer the sculpted details onto the OG mesh, but as sculpting data instead, which means you can use the displacement eraser to remove any parts that are stretched etc…
Very nice job, congrats !. How did you transfer the texture from textures xyz to the model ?? Did you use substance for that. Normaly I use zbrush and the plugin zwarp for this process
