VFX - Character Grooming Artist

Hey, 

I am a senior Game Graphics Student at Howest - Digital Arts and Entertainment  in Belgium, with the passion of becoming a grooming artist for VFX. To specialize and focus on the hair/fur creation, I decided to start with basemeshes from other artists and 3Dscanstore as a foundational mesh. By doing this I was able to instantly start grooming and focusing on the details. 

The vimeo video shows my current demoreel of the last few personal projects I made:

This is my latest project. The groom was made in Xgen / Maya and rendered in Arnold. For this I decided to use a headscan from 3Dscanstore as a more accurate basemesh than a gray head. Way more fun to see the groom on a finished head afterwards. 

The hairs were split up in multiple grooms that made sense: Hair / Beard / Moustache / Eyebrows / Eyelashes / Peach Fuzz. All of them were done by hand placing / shaping the guides for maximum control, only the peach fuzz was done interactively as this made more sense. 

I learned a lot of things on the previous 2 projects that I was able to apply and perfect in this groom. Several aspects were tackled more efficiently and it felt like an improvement. Looking forward to the next grooming projects!

The next images give an overview of the final result, the hair isolated and the guides it took to create the hairshape:

An overview of the progress after the initial hairflow was blocked out. 

-First image shows the hair without any modifiers. Only width variations and various mask/desity maps are painted here.

-Second image shows the hairs with the various clumping modifiers added to each groom.

-Third image is the final result after refinement with clumping, noise, cut and other modifiers active and setup individually for each groom area.

My first animal groom. This was done with the interactive groom tool where you basically comb the hairs into place more or less. As the lioness fur is fairly short this was the best tool to use. Really glad with how the clumping in the neck turned out.

Model by Gael Kerchenbaum

The first groom I did. For this I made a Hair / Beard / Eyebrow and Eyelash groom. This is the project that started the love for grooming and inspired the other grooms.

Model by Saurabh Jethani

Some different angles of the groom as well as the guides that I made to convey the hairflow