FRANCK PAULIN - VFX ROOKIES ENTRY 2021

Tommy Shelby

(Cillian Murphy likeness)

I have a real passion for anatomy. I spend lot of time learning the relationship with bones, muscles, and how it interacts with eachother to create forms, wrinkles...

With this project, I really wanted to focus on the face anatomy and the likeness. The idea to do the full body came a bit later on. My goal was to learn the full process of a photorealistic character, from sculpting, retoplogy, UVs, terturing/shading and rendering. It was quite challenging for me since it was my first attempt at a full character creation.

I enjoyed every moments of the process, it was an amazing journey and a great opportunity to push myself. I've learned a lot of new techniques, like Grooming with Xgen or using Texturing XYZ to get a nice and realistic displacement for the face.

Portrait

Everyone who has ever tried a likeness study know how hard is it and how frustrating it can be. Before I started, I gathered lot of references of the actor, from every angles. After that, I began with a simple sphere in Zbrush, I took my time, and day after day I was closer to the final look ! Face anatomy is pretty difficult and time consuming, but it's not a problem when you love what you do.

I would like to share a bit of that process, from a barely human face, to my final sculpt.

I sculpted the whole model inside of Zbrush. I wanted to start everything from scracth, which means I didn't used any basemesh for my project. After the sculpt done, I've imported my model in Maya for the retopo and UVs stage.

You can see below a quick BPR render out of Zbrush from the early stage of the process.

As I said before, at the beginning of this project, I was totally new to Xgen. On the pictures below, you can see how I used the guides technique to create and control the shape of the eyebrows and eyelashes. I did the same thing for the hair, and I added one last description for the peach fuzz.

FINAL RENDERS

ENGLISH BULLDOG

After my likeness study, which took me a very long time, I needed a little break. I saw on the internet a photo of a bulldog puppy, and I thought it would be a great practice and funny to sculpt him. This is what I get after a bit less than two afternoons working on the sculpt: 

At this point I was really pleased by the result, but I wanted to challenge myslef again. From what I've learned of Xgen with my last project, I decided to try some fur techniques. First I did a basic polypaint inside of Zbrush on the dog's body, which will help me with the fur's color later in the process.

After that, I've imported my model in Maya to add the fur. I also used substance painter for the collar and the chain. I tried different light setups and HDRIs to get the result I wanted for the render.

If you want to see more of my work, you can check my demoreel, with those two projects and two older one that I like aswell.

Thank you for your time !