DigiDouble With A Pearl Earring

I would love to present to you my first digital double project from my third year at ESMA.

I was inspired to recreate my self portrait to echo the painting « Girl With A Pearl Earring » by Johannes Vermeer (1665). Being an iconic oil painting, it is instantly recognizable by the posing of the model, the dramatic lighting, the titular pearl earring, and the colors—the azure blue bandana contrasting with the creams and browns of the rest of the composition. Taking these things into account, I made sure to plan out how I can translate these into my work to make something that is clearly inspired by this great painter and yet is also clearly me. 

The process began by scanning my face.

We took around 100 images of all angles of my face, then used Agisoft Photoscan to generate a point cloud, which then translated to a very high polygon mesh. 

Next, I brought this into Unreal Engine 5 to make use of their MetaHuman feature. This helped me create a base mesh, rigged, that I could use to pose my model to match my painting reference. The base model exported directly from MetaHuman didn’t look exactly like me since it was based on the pointcloud I generated before. So, in Maya, I sculpted the model to match my features, having my photographs as image planes to match everything as close as possible.

After sculpting, I posed my model to match the mysterious over-shoulder glance of the girl in the painting. 

At this point, after analyzing my reference closely once again, I set up my lighting scene in Maya. This was a rewarding part of the process because I could really start to see what shapes I could emphasize and the mood I could bring. 

Next began the texturing and shading.

This was the most time consuming part of the project for me. I went through quite a few drafts and edit versions before I got something I was happy with for my skin displacement and look.

I used TexturingXYZ maps in Mari for the skin, Flipped Normals for iris and sclera textures, and cross-polarized photos of myself for the albedo.

I painted maps for subsurface and speculars, and combined the latter with a cavity map created in Photoshop from my displacement.

The shading networks were set up with Renderman 24 in Maya. The subsurface model I used is exponential path traced. Again, a long process, but throughout it I learned the nuances and difficulties of creating realistic skin and eyes. A lot of anatomy references were used and now I can confidently name different parts of the eye. Observing the meniscus and caustics in the eyes has all of my friends a little unsettled. 

After this, I began the grooming.

I separated it into different descriptions depending on the parts of the hair and stability of my computer at the time, taking into account the area covered by the bandana. I ended up with a description for the back, the bangs, the eyebrows, the lashes, the flyaways and the peach fuzz (vellum) all over the face. The shape of the hair, with the bandana on top, resembles the fabric that the girl in the painting has covering her head. This was my favorite part of the process because I could experiment a little with how my hair would fall down my back, and I had a little creative liberty with the look of it. I tend to change my hair color often, so I matched the color to the one I had at the moment of the project, which also stays with the warm shades of the painting.

The shading was done with PxrMarschnerHair in Renderman. 

At this point, the project was coming to life.

I modeled and textured the clothes directly in Maya. The pearl earring was modeled to match a pair I have in real life. This was the finishing touch to have a clear reference to the original work, and still had my personality within it.

Quick post processing and color grading was done in Nuke.

Overall, this was an incredibly rewarding process and I am very grateful to have had the support of my teachers and my friends guiding me throughout it and urging me to make it better and reach for a higher standard. I have learned more from this project that I ever have before, and I look forward to creating even more digital portraits soon.

Thank you for taking the time to view my work and my breakdown. If you’d like to reach out, my email is [email protected].