Madala(Old man Bust)

This was my take on a old face, with slightly stylized facial proportions. My goal here was to study what makes a character stylized. The project started in Zbrush and ended up rendered in 3ds Max...This was my end result. 

MY PROCESS

Before starting any project, I like to spend some time gathering some reference and start making observations. This is what i will use to measure my project up to throughout my entire process. 

BLOCKING OUT THE FACE

Here I was really trying to figure out the shape of my bust, where and what I was going to exaggerate and how to make it all come together without him looking to weird.

IT'S ALL ABOUT THEM DETAILS 

After finding something that I was happy with, I continued to push the facial details. Making sure that my model looked good from all angles. Working on my primary, secondary and finally ending off with the skin details, pores and wrinkles. 

I used ZRemesher to retopologize the mesh. I was not too bothered about manually retopologizing because my aim was just to product a really good looking rendered piece. (This is why I will not be posting any wire frames haha) 

TIME TO TEXTURE

Now that the sculpting phase was over with, It was time to texture this old man. But first things first, I needed to unrwap this guy. I unwrapped everything in Zbrush, and was content with the results thereof. 

I now moved on to polypainting the face, and went in as far as I could, in terms of the subdermal, scatter and epidermal layers. I then exported the maps and pulled them into Photoshop, where added a lot of skin detailing, defects, and colour corrected to get the best results for his skin. 

This is what the polypaint version looked like in zbrush 

This is what he looked like after the Photoshop edits to the skin. This was opened in Substance Painter

LET'S GET SERIOUS WITH THE TEXTURING

In Substance Painter now, I used the my previously painted skin texture in an overlay of textured to get the perfect blend, and to already enhance what I already had. This took quite some time as I was measuring this up to my reference sheet. 

I tried  subtly hinting at places of interest by slightly saturating the ears and nose.  

This was my end result and my time in substance was drawing to a close. I was not a fan of those eyes though and I thought I would much rather solve the issue in 3d max and photoshop.

LET THE RENDER TESTS BEGIN

In 3ds max Vray I set up a skin shader, pulled in all my textures from substance and I hit render. Needless to say, It needed a lot more tweaking. 

So I did a few more tests on the skin, really making sure that those skin layers are in good relation to one another. From an almost translucent jelly like creature to simulating realistic human-like skin. Again always comparing it to real world reference. 

ADDING FACIAL HAIR 

Creating the hair was the most challenging part. I went through a series of trial and error, and none of them looked good enough. 

Here I imported my splines straight from Zbrush and the result was....yeah it wasn't that great. 

After realising that there was no easy way to producing good looking hair, I rolled up my sleeves and really started to apply myself. (This is hair and fur in 3ds Max by the way, nothing special here)

In Zbush I  would create super low poly versions of different parts of his face where I wanted to spawn the hair. This method worked really well for me as I was able to isolate and groom the different parts to the beard and eyebrows.

I really tried to pay attention with the beard, going in as far as growing and studying my own beard haha. I also managed to add some nose hair and ear hair if you look closely. I used a fresnel map as overlay to give it that peach fuzz look over the edges. 

POST FX 

After the render it was time to do some work in Photoshop. Here I fixed the colour temperature, giving it a cooler feel. I desaturated the skin except for places like the nose, ears and eyes to really give the face some contrast. I went ahead and added noise to the image, I feel that it makes it look a bit more like a photograph.

This was my my process, I hope you enjoyed it. 

Thanks For Watching