I’m working on a stylized self-portrait bust on my free time with a goal of finishing a little less than a month from now. It’s for a program we’re doing at work and it has a deadline (week of June 17).
I’m trying to follow what I understand the industry workflow to be for creating characters, that is concept drawing > sculpt > retopologize > texture & shade > rig > render.
There are several goals for me on this project:
Portfolio quality. I have a background in drawing, and the general 3D and VFX pipeline (through university, self-learning, and work… Though I’ve never really worked “in the industry” except for 1 month some years back, haha). But even with all this general knowledge, I’ve yet to create a high quality render I’ve been proud of, so portfolio-quality is the aim here (so feedback is welcome!).
Education and experience. I’m researching a lot as I go, watching/reading a whole lot of tutorials and finding resources. Also, I’m taking my time to make everything decent and to explore tools I haven’t really used before.
Extensibility. I’m creating a bust for this project, but I want to be able to create the rest of the body later should I choose. I’m uncertain about the extent of rigging I’ll be doing, but whatever I do, I want to have it be easily modified and added to later on.
Anyways, enough context, onto the fun stuff!
First, here’s the rough concept. Nothing about it is really final except for the overall design of the head:
It was more difficult than expected to understand features that make me me and to create a stylized version of myself. Took me far more hours than I care to admit to get to this point, haha, but co-workers have confirmed this is me.
Then I took some time to work out the front and side orthographic views:
This is my first project in the upcoming version 2.8. For the final image, I know Cycles is the ideal renderer (well, for physically accurate quality), but I’m thinking of having Eevee as the goal renderer. Fingers crossed that this isn’t a ill-informed decision, haha.
Also, I’ve never taken a 3D project from concept to a polished end before. I thought it makes sense to create a log of my progress here. And, as stated above, feedback is welcome!
I don’t really have experience sculpting (real life or virtual, though I’ve messed with it slightly before in 3D). But the tools in Blender feel very straight forward and I think I’m getting the hang of it.
For the final version, it’ll probably look close to the “sharpened” version, albeit dialed back a bit.
Side note: I’m loving the visual quality of 2.8, and the many UX changes. I’m still getting used to it, and I’ve yet to really customize the hotkeys, but I’m finding many aspects of it such a treat!
Hey man great work so far, a bit of a trick for the lips is to keep them closed until you retopo then it’s fairly straightforward to create a mouth bag(select mouth edge loop, extrude inwards a few times, and gridfill). Good luck, looking forward to seeing more of your work!
Thanks! The plan is definitely to keep the mouth closed until retopology, but I do want to also create the inside of the mouth with gums, teeth, and tongue. Not entirely sure how to exactly tackle this yet. Right now I’m thinking of finishing sculpting the exterior of the head, retopo, then model the inside of the mouth then sculpt additional detail for the teeth with Multiresolution modifier.
I find myself constantly revising details, but I think I’m almost done with the sculpt. I have to still figure out what to do with the hair (geometry? particles? cards?) and inside of mouth. I’ll probably at the very least mock up a sculpt.
I did another pass of tweaking and revisions on the sculpt. Major reworking of the ears, much more definition on the lips, various feature tweaks on nose and eyebrows, and changes to neck to bottom for better anatomy and a bit more stylistic definition.
Whoa, it’s been 20 days. A whole lot more has been done since, but I haven’t felt a good stopping point to post updates.
Anyhow, the program at my work pretty much wrapped up, and I presented what I had. I didn’t hit all the goals I wanted for this project, but I’d like to think I did have a solid presentation render.
However, I won’t be posting that here, haha. I’ve been doing even more work since, and I want to post an updated version of what I presented later.
That said, I do want to post some of the progress updates.
I’m going for something in-between realistic and cartoonish. It took quite a bit of work so far, but it’s getting there. There’s still more I want to experiment with, so don’t want to call it done yet.
And the low-poly model + displacement map + eyes + textures & shaders:
