Old Man Portrait

The following project was started as a speed sculpt practice of portraiture. I learned the method from a professor on University and it basically involves taking reference from 3D.sk of faces, front, side and 3/4 views, and sculpting the face in intervals anywhere from 15min to 2 hours. 

By doing this I went from not being able to sculpt a generic face to this portrait of an old man, which is currently the only one I resolved up to this point.

Substance Painter was used for texturing, with a method I learned from a course by Flippednormals, wrapping a scan with a wrap tool. Larger skin folds and wrinkles were hand sculpted and additional from scan data really made the face believable. 

Making skin color was also a big learning experience. I first painted a base for the subdermal layer and then added skin tone on top of that. Then to make the skin appear more rough and old I added a layer of sun damage.

When it comes to grooming I was very hesitant to get into xGen since I'm very familiar with grooming in Houdini, but I gave it a try. It was easy to pick up from Houdini and was even more straight forward in some cases like making stray hairs. Overall for the first time using it I love it, and combined with the amazing hair and skin shader in Arnold it was a treat looking at renders.

Hair color exploration

Test renders with groom and skin

Final render and comp