Alien Portrait - Short Cinematic

This is my Endterm 200 Project I created at Pixl Visn Media Arts Academy in 1 week. This is my second high detailed character I have ever done. A few weeks before Endterm, I decided to test it by creating the Baron from Dune (the new one). It was truly a challenge and I learned ALOT with it. So after that I felt somewhat comfortable to do something like this in Endterm and here is my result. Again, I learned a ton and there is 1000 things I would like to change on it. Overall tough I am fairly happy with how it turned out. I am looking forward to doing more work in this area (characters / portraits etc.) because I discovered that I really love doing it.

With the Baron, I also made my first groom ever. I realized it can be trickier than I thought especially with animated and skinned characters. That's why I decided to only do a basic groom of like micro hairs and stubbles instead of doing actual long hair. I am also completely new to the UDIM workflow. I used 6 UDIM tiles for this character, each 8k. I learned that its smarter to go more Tiles at smaller resolution and I should have definitely used twice as much tiles. Sadly in the closeups the textures are still kind of blurry.

I created the Flip Fluid animation in blender and I have to say, this is one of the things I'm least happy about in this project. I simply had underestimated how much tweaking and time these things take. Especially such small sims like blood flowing down a face. It was literally tweak one small settings by 0.01 + or - and then bake for 15 mins. Looks horrible - tweak by 0.01 and bake again 15 mins and repeat. It was a super not fun process and I will never touch it again. At least not until we had some proper classes about it (which it think we will in Term 300). As of the other shots, I tried to make them as cinematic as possible and I hope I achieved that.

First time using HD Geometry in zBrush and yea I would say its absolutely amazing that its possible to sculpt in such high detail and at the same time its just painful to work with it. Everything takes 10 times longer and yea I built up some hate for zBrush's quick save. I guess people who have worked with it will know what I mean. Anyway, it's a fantastic program and I love it to death.

I'm also very new to Mari and I have to say - coming from Substance Painter - it took me a good while to see Mari's advantages. But working now with many UDIMs and large textures it became very clear. And since I was kind of forced to use it on the Baron and this project, I even started to really like it. Substance still has a special spot in my heart for smaller and especially quick hardsurface assets but characters..I will never do it somewhere else again.

Full workflow overview in that order:

1. blockout and baseshapes - zBrush

2. retopology / UV layout - Maya

3. Refining and Detailing - zBrush

4. Texture baking (Displacement / Normal / AO / Cavity - zBrush

5. Texturing - Mari

6. Shading, Rendering and compositing - Blender

7. Video Editing - DaVinci Resolve

I am looking forward for my next Midterm 300 Project. I enjoy the homeworks but Mid and Endterms are seriously the most fun and the best learning experiences out of all.

Id love to get as much feedback as possible! Feel free to rip it apart