How I made Cyberpunk Girl | Commentary (Zbrush + Arnold)

hey what's up i'm jay and this is how i made cyberpunk girl so first off just want to thank you guys for the reception um this one really hit hard with people it seems so i'm really glad that you guys like how she came out kind of funny if we jump over here to the video when i posted it up i said uh in the comment i was like hey if we get 500 likes we'll make the making up video which is this video that we're making right now and we got to 8.5 000 likes so far so so i gotta set higher goals is what we're learning but yeah so this video is gonna be a little bit longer form uh we're gonna get nerdy we're gonna talk about some details and my goals of this video was to address the most commonly asked questions by you guys so i jotted down the most commonly asked questions and then we're gonna tackle them one by one in this video kind of give an overview and then we'll dive into some of the big ticket items a couple common questions that make sense for me to answer right off the top are the song a lot of people ask what song it is it's from epidemic sound and it's called expanding by elliptic i don't know if it's on you know spotify or anything but i use epidemic sound for my videos another commonly asked question is how long did this project take and it took me around 30 hours of work time probably a little bit more and then obviously there's rendering and stuff but i'm not in the chair when it's doing that so i'll say around 30 hours my goal with this project was to make a fan art kind of a tribute to the game cyberpunk 2077 really they're aesthetic which is dope and i just love the cyberpunk aesthetic in general that genre uh and i also been wanting to do a girl with kind of an fu attitude uh for a while so i just kind of merged those ideas together to make this character and then i released it the day that cyberpunk the game came out also as a dev i do feel for those guys so i hope they get to rectify that game soon and people can start playing it again so that's it without further ado let's jump in and take a look at how i made cyberpunk girl all right i thought i would start out by taking a look at my reference board so i build these for every project they also kind of you know get bigger and bigger as time goes on you can see i have these little islands that kind of radiate out and um you know everyone builds their reference boards their own way it's pretty crazy but it's like a mind map or something but i thought it'd be interesting to see you know here's the character that i was taking a spin on and then you can see like what i'm mixing in here here's like face reference here's my dumb face doing the pose you can see like i'm doing this like stinky face this is one of my key references um i got this from art station actually a reference pack photo reference pack for doing studies and then we have details and and all that stuff so i can see tattoos and jewelry these glasses which i thought i was gonna do these are some badass glasses i thought but i ended up opting not to do it because i didn't want to cover up the eyes i thought so much stuff was going on already with the eyes that i didn't want to cover it up so you can see some color palette stuff uh general vibe i love this photo uh by harris newcomb so you know i'm just kind of this is this is a glimpse into some references right that i'm using the hair here's a friend of mine that has like some cool gradients and not like ton of curly hair and flyaways and stuff i got a lot of comments that uh my character looked like natalie dormer i think her name is and you can see she's in the reference what do you know so that's it let's jump over to zbrush and check out how i started the project alright so starting off i'm starting my project like i start all my projects with a base mesh this is uh the base mesh that i've made i've been asked if it's available anywhere and it's not i've just been trying to make it as perfect as possible so i've been refining it myself for the last several projects and it's what i use for everything that i do and if i do release it i'll let you guys know but you definitely don't need this particular base mesh you could use you know zbrush comes with some you know it's just to get up and running i just like you know particular things so i'm using my own it's important for me to get eyes in uh early and while i'm working on faces because eyes influence you know the eyelids and then the eyebrows and so there's kind of a chain reaction i knew there was going to be kind of a stank face on this one i knew it should be looking downwards which is going to affect the eyelids so it's just general practice i'm always i'm always putting in the eyes as quick as possible and then i get right started on the facial expression so you'll see like i start by making polygroups so i can do quick selections uh i delete all the polygons that i don't need because i know this is going to be a bust actually i gave myself a lot more room than the final render ended up being but i just wanted to give myself some safety net in case i wanted to back the camera up and then i started writing on the facial expression i started opening the mouth you know i started pushing the face muscles around to get the stank face i knew where i was headed so i just started right in on it and you can see too that i already broke symmetry so just right off the jump getting right into it so this is another thing that i've been asked you can see i actually model it in pose so i'm going for a particular image the whole way through this isn't like i'm making a production ready character and then building a rig and then creating the pose that way so she can animate and stuff like that this is very much just made all in this pose so i keep it low for a while and then i subdivided up to four you'll see later we're gonna do the hd geometry workflow so i know i'm gonna cap it at four so i just divided it right up to four so i can start pushing and pulling things around and and knowing like what my limitations are in terms of the subdivisions starting to add like finer lines you know in the in the corner of the lip curl and around the nose drawing a mask to make the cheek come out so i'm starting to build slowly but i'm starting to work in that facial pose and get the compression the jacket itself pretty easy just drawing a mask on the torso extracting that and then i remesh it so the goal here is just to make a general jacket shape with neutral enough topology for me to sculpt it however i want so you'll see i i push and pull it and then i zero mesh it several times smooth it until i get a nice neutral topology that's all quadded out and it looks kind of like a jacket then for the collar i just used the modeler extruded out that collar it's pretty cool that now edge extrude actually works uh as you would want so that's kind of an awesome update in the later versions of zbrush so i can do things like this and then the collar around the neck i just started with a cylinder and then i deleted everything i didn't need i used the slice brush to just get the contour around the coat and then now we have a simple color geometry extruded it for thickness and then really quick just showing i did do the these are really only in the background in the final image but i did the little you know tech cylinder things that go on her shoulder that's a part of the cyberpunk design so i just wanted to make sure i got it in there all right so after some quick modeling putting it on place now um you know duplicating it i just made one and then i got eight out of it so that's pretty good back on the collar using damn standard now putting in the stitch you can see how things start off pretty sketchy but you know just gets me to know where things go and then i can just refine so i'm just outlining it and i'm also leaning into the whole organic nature of it that's why i like organic creatures and leather and clothes and stuff because you don't have to be too precious uh you can be a little loose this is that inset that the cords go in i make the cords at the end but i knew this was gonna have to be there and then it's already jotting down some wrinkles so another question i had is how i did the cloth and wrinkles so we'll see a little bit of that but you know it's just straight up sculpting i'm trying to be generally fast with these things so i'm just doing things i know how to do so i know there's some brushes that can do cloth like things in zbrush but i've just done some limited testing and to get you know anything out that i like i'd have to just practice a lot more so right now just straight up sculpting it you know using that little chisel alpha and going to town making some wrinkles trying to make sense of it a little bit um but you know i did get pretty willy-nilly here with the caller but going over the stitch you know to make it look like it's dimpling the stitches is dimpling the leather and then doing some bigger wrinkles smaller wrinkles so mixing it up just just general cloth sculpting for me nothing too crazy and um you know nothing too specific i just know it's it's not going to be the focal point of the image so i just need it to look organic so same thing with the coat you know starting out with the dam standard drawing the seams which helps me pillow the shapes and then getting to carve out where these cylinders go and this gives me kind of rhyme or reason like where wrinkles will go you know so i'm starting with the seams and where things transition and then i know i can just kind of make the the material look like it's bunching up in between those landmarks to hopefully sell the shape of the wrinkles here we go just making some little zigzaggy patterns again i know it's not the focal point so and i'm trying to keep it fast so you know it's like the kind of material it is it's going to have generally like soft wrinkles so i'm just making sure that the surface doesn't look perfect and that's really it you know so again just straight up sculpting and and you know good enough all right so you can see my collar i kept all the subdivision levels so i can go all the way down so i duplicated it when all the way down and now i'm going to turn this into the collar light it's another question i got a few times so we're going to we're going to take a look at using z modeler to make that kind of color light shape nothing too crazy just you know might be good to see it see modeler is something i think isn't used too much but i've just gotten used to it over the years because it's so convenient not leaving zbrush you know so doing like general modeling tasks i use it so that that whole like rigmarole was just to get this loop this poly loop that that fits inside of the collar and then we'll start adding edges collapsing edges and stuff to make that that little pattern for the light alright so inserting an edge loop beveling it and adding two rows now so i'm not losing that middle one so there we go now we got these two rows perfectly in the middle now i'm just adding and deleting edges so i'm essentially scooching them where they need to be then collapsing the ones i don't need so we're already getting there you see now i'm moving this down by drawing transpose from vert divert two i'm making sure that it's translating along the axis here so just nudging it so we're getting there already and now that i have this shape i can insert edge loops uh actually i just need one yeah there we go one there we go and then if i inset that one cleaning this up welding deleting edges uh in setting again it's getting super junky but that's okay again i like just staying in zbrush and um being a little bit you know organic so it's also just maybe it's just laziness but but uh but here you go so now we're now we're cooking getting there all right now we can just bevel this so i can remove the gap in between you know and then we're gonna have these rows there we go there we go i gotta delete this one um or bevel and get the tip here you can see how the bevel was being weird so i just added i just inserted loops this is what i do in zmodeler a lot like i can't get exactly what i want uh one way so i just do some basic thing another way but there you go now we've got all these uh loops that do this pattern and it fits on the inside of the collar and then pretty easy just extruding and creasing the edges and then uh then it holds its shape and rounds it and that's really it for for this shape i don't know if you can tell so the hair ends up blocking it but there's an error see there's actually a mistake in this collar light that i modeled it and the other side like i didn't mirror it at the right time or whatever and it created this gap so you see i'm only working on this side and then when i'm done it's different over there so i could have easily just done a mirror and weld it would have been fine but i kind of liked the other shape even though it was by accident and i thought i'll just leave it asymmetrical because it looked like a complex techie shape um but you kind of end up seeing it in the render you see you can see it now i just kind of liked it so uh so i kept it i always i always figured if i didn't like it in the final image i could always mirror this uh but didn't really play a role but i thought it was kind of a happy accident all right so now rotating i refining the shape a little bit of the face you know i'm making progress in the face so i'm rotating those these eyes down i'm actually kind of faking the final um camera position that i'm thinking you know that's slightly downward looking up so i i'm you know rotating the eyes and then following suit with the eyelids uh now i'm moving the nose so i'm actually turning it off axis i'm trying to sell that as the skin moves up in this in this pose that it's pulling you know parts of the facial feature with it to really get this compression as you can see i sketched in the snarl already with damn standard and then just refining this area like pushing pulling adding volume all right so isolating the lips starting to draw more shapes in here this is damn standard again and just uh kind of going with the flow i've got some reference a couple different facial features that are close or facial poses that are close and so kind of just going off different shapes that i like in in lips that are scrunching and then uh going back over it you can see too i kind of jump in right at the the parts that i feel are the most important you know like i need to nail this corner the rest of the parts kind of follow suit but the snarl right here that i'm working on um the cheek coming up the eye compressing so i'm really just spending the most time up front on the most important areas and what i would think would become the focal point and uh and then everything else you know doesn't need as much time essentially because you're just trying to tackle the you know the big ones it's also kind of a strategy of just getting the monsters out of the way you know what i mean like not putting off what is i don't know if the scariest part is the right way to say it but the most daunting are the most important parts you know just not putting it off not trying to procrastinate on on the things that need to get done and i'm not sure how to do it i rather just jump in try to tackle the hardest things first so still pretty much all damn standard and clay tubes and obviously move brush and then some standard brush so those are the go-to brushes and those brushes i'll have on on hot keys because i'm switching around so much all right looking to be in a pretty good spot getting ready here to start adding details all right isolating the lips starting to add little high frequency details here this is my fine line brush and i'm just kind of you know kind of sketching it in in a way you know getting the wrinkles getting the flow in the direction right and then i can always go over them again and uh you know what i don't end up making deeper just becomes a really fine wrinkle which is fine that's part of skin you know so that's cool with me all right so adding some more of those fine lines now with the fine line brush to this to the lips you can see it's starting to come alive now especially when i'm starting to like crisscross them and this is something that i'm i'm going to be refining like the lips aren't done but i just wanted to start getting in there it's kind of a good spot for me to like start the high frequency detail too you know before things get a little too out of control the lips are going to be another focal point so figured might as well dive in there uh and that'll help that'll help her look more natural too you can see i even have that subtle expression on the chin the different chin muscles there so that's something i sketched in early too the way that the wrinkle breaks along the cheek so like the expression's already in a pretty good spot because i i tackled it first so we're already you know starting to be able to add that high frequency detail on top to start to bring it to life so we're looking pretty good and this is uh you know this could be meditative um depends some people don't like doing this but i like doing this you know when it goes well obviously it can be frustrating to spend like an hour doing tedious work and then you have to throw it out but uh but if i'm just jamming and adding detail and going with the flow and then the kind of illusion of it looking more believable happens that's what's satisfying to me so it's why i like doing the things by hand it gives me the most control and also the most satisfaction of trying to turn my scopes into more believable characters okay now we're going to get ready get these models prepped so i'm showing you here that i'm using the unwrap in zbrush so i'm actually even doing to the head right now because i want the head and the torso to all just be one map just to save time make it easier so i'm actually just nuking the uvs i had on it before and uh and you can see now it does a pretty good job jumping down to the flatten mode and then rescaling it because the head needs to be more important so i'm just going to save out an 8k map and then uh and there you go you can see i'm going to make the torso real small but it doesn't matter because it's not as important so yeah just showing you here so i actually uv mapped the torso the collar the jacket i mean everything everything that needed uvs i just unwrapped it in here all right so now i just divided my head several times in the hd so sub d4 is as high as i went in the traditional subdivisions and then i went up the rest of the way in hd geo because i'm going to do the fine detailing in the hd mode and then export a 32-bit displacement map that's going to be my workflow so i can render it in arnold and keep all those crispy deets so now i'm just refining it and then we're gonna dive into doing some high frequency detail so the detail uh on this face and you know all the characters that i've been making kind of in recent history i've been i've been making detail assets brushes and textures that i've used and we're going to see it right here and i actually just recently published those i bundled all the little assets that i used to build this kind of high frequency detail on my characters and now you can use them too in your own project so if that's something that you're interested in i put the link in the description below all right so now we're jumping into hd geometry so you do that by mousing over your mesh and hitting a in case you didn't know so that's what's going to happen you're going to see the mesh get you know kind of weirdly masked this means we're in hd so now i'm loading up one of my skin texture maps that i made into the surface noise as an alpha and projecting it now this does it from the camera angle once you drop it into hd so i'm gonna have to do this a few times but this is what i do to lay down a lot of pores at once so i'm just dialing in the size and the depth and i stored a morph target before i commit this to the geometry so then i can wash it out and then i can control it i just hit switch on the morph target so that kind of takes it back to when i stored it and now the morph brush adds it back so this way i can you know slowly build up the pores to the depth that i want and only in the places that i want and since this only works from this camera view i have to do it on the other camera view alright so once my pore texture is done the bulk of the work i start to button up everything else by hand this is a poor group brush and then i've got these individual pore brushes so this is how i do the skin detail my characters i do it by hand using assets that i built up which i also made by hand here i am reinforcing the uh pores that are scrunching in the expression you know as she like compresses her skin i'm trying to get the wrinkles in between the pores as they squash so yeah if you want to know more about skin detailing um a part of the skin detail kit that i just put up has some videos that go a little bit more in depth on my workflow and how i use it with arnold and exporting them all right really quick wanted to mention uh how i did the diamonds because i thought it was kind of interesting it's a zbrush workflow too again so i just extracted these shapes off the teeth that i already had and z remeshed them and then used z modeler to clean them up and then i made the diamond so i started with a cylinder and then i extruded this out started using z modeler again just to add some edges and i looked up a diamond cut you know online so i'm just putting edges where those chisels are and i'm using radial symmetry uh to save some time again z modeler not perfect so i'm having to do some some tricky stuff you know some like welds and cuts and all that stuff to make it work but nonetheless we get there uh we get a cylinder that's that's diced up as the edges are in the cut of a diamond then i can just move it up and then i'm going to extrude the edge down and then vary that up like the diamond then i can extrude the bottom to a point and here we go cooking with a diamond so my goal here is to make this diamond model and then i'm going to add it to this insert mesh brush and then i'm going to use the modeler again which lets you attach it as a nano mesh and so i'm going to attach it as a nano mesh to the teeth geo that we made in the beginning and there we go got some diamonds all right so here's this test render so i actually took some time i built up this in maya did a render with the displacement map and then i did a paint over so that i could kind of get a sense like am i heading in the right direction do i have what i need it's kind of a sanity check and then i went to build the real scene all right so i imported my models and then uh i imported an hdri as an arnold environment light to you know just uh to light up the scene doing a quick render now have it on the basic settings like the default render settings i'm doing a relatively low resolution so i can start setting things up fast you know dialing the camera in dialing the light direction i'm actually assigning an arnold material and making it emissive so i can get the collar light which i knew was going to be a important part of the composition you can see it's actually orange now i change that later i'm importing my eye assets that i've made again by hand and again something that i'm reusing to save time and so here i am uh positioning the light and the intensity all this stuff is gonna change slightly a bunch of times but right now i'm just dialing in the main idea all right so starting to assign more materials just assigned a standard surface to the skin use the skin preset then we're going into the hypershade and graphing that going to the displacement and then i'm attaching the texture that i exported from zbrush that 32-bit high-res displacement and then i'm going into the object settings turning on the cat clark subdivisions and the auto bump so i'm going over this fast you know we can go more in depth in this later but this is setting up the displacement map workflow in arnold so now i'm getting up and on going with that starting to change some of the settings also using a preset for diamonds that's also in arnold so quickly setting up all the elements that i need to build up my scene and this is what the render looks like so far all right so showing you two of the early stages of what became the neon light setup so early on i knew that i wanted the render to have very colorful lights and i also knew that i wanted the yellow background the iconic yellow background from the cyberpunk 2077 like images so this took the most iteration the neon setup eventually i just made keyframes of each camera angle and setup but just showing you the beginning stages of what became neon so the eyes um my eye color is controlled with a ramp because it's the way it's uv mapped so i'm actually using a ramp now and plugging it into a mission and giving it that pink color so that it glows and then later i make this a little bit more complicated too i'll add you know detail in my ramp and then i actually use a different ramp to subtract that detail to add these little techie shapes out of it so the skin uh not only am i using the displacement map i'm also using an ai noise here a cell noise and you can see while it's big so i'm isolating it so i can work on it so it's this like organic pattern i think it's called alligator yeah it's called alligator so it's this organic cellular pattern and what i'm doing is i'm playing with the settings here and i'm going to make this extremely small and then i'm going to mix those displacements so all my hand sculpted detail and then this super high frequency uh organic noise essentially so that it breaks up the light and it actually it's so small it even adds a little bit of roughness and then it just holds up extremely close so this is like a cellular you know skin pattern that i'm just putting over the entire skin so this is part of my setup in the skin shading and this i think gives it that extra hyper real quality and something that i thought i would put in here i got a lot of questions also on the skin shading so this is really kind of the last piece of the puzzle you can see i'm isolating it again now so i can work on it and then now we're seeing everything mixed together and uh you know so it's a small thing that might be hard to perceive i'm also rendering right here i'm just showing you i did a really high quality setting so i could see it like at full res all right so the skin painting this is how i did the color of the skin i actually just polly painted it right in zbrush i'm using the scatter you can actually see my my brushes down there in the lower left so i'm using like a color spray and some noisy alphas and i'm going in between hd and non-hd so sometimes i don't need a lot of resolution for like gradients right and then sometimes i do need a lot of resolution and that's that's a key component in believable skin is a detailed base color so even though the contrast is very shallow let's say you know there's not a lot of there's not like a big range between the darks and the lights i think it is important though to get a sharpness on the details that you're painting and then you know varying color varying value it's that sharpness like you know you could think of freckles as a good example but i'm doing that over and over again at various like opacity levels so to create kind of a noise in the base color and that you know once it's rendered with a ray trace render and it's doing subsurface it's not exactly how i would do it for a game but it just adds that extra believability because putting in the subsurface color it like spreads around and it just completes that illusion so you'll see almost all my brush strokes here have this you know kind of random noisy detail and the idea is that i'm building up layers of color value shapes and the fact that i'm doing it in hd sometimes i go all the way up to full res and i'll do really really tiny little circles and stuff and i'll keep it sharp again i think that just helps the believability to be mixing some soft detail some sharp detail you know just all kinds of variation just very low contrast here i'm using the masking tools to do like a cavity mask of sorts and then adding a little bit of darkness in there too so here i'm doing it in the flat view now so there's no shading you can see what's happening here so i'm actually picking up some of the detail that i put in the sculpt and i'm just lightly you know putting a darker color in there which will help pop those out and and help feel a little bit more believable another thing too i use um cross polarized photography uh just like you know i have it on my pinterest board i've got these skin photographs and examples and scans of real life people with no lighting whatsoever so i use those you know as a reference uh to get some kind of uh idea to do detail color shape and stuff like that so that's kind of what i'm painting here especially in this unlit mode so i want it to still look like skin even if it's in the unlit mode adding some veins around the nose always a fun detail just spraying these are all the default alphas too by the way when i'm doing the color i'm just putting it right on there now i'm actually putting in some of my pores from my skin detail kit and i have some color too so this is how i'm doing like blackheads there we go now we got some blackheads starting to do some washes of purples even around the eyes red around the nose so paying attention to color variation and trying to add it where i can alright starting to refine the lip color now painted in a darker pink now using these cavity masking tools again to start to break up the color in the wrinkles and creases in the lips in between the wrinkles you know so the wrinkles are darker but not necessarily getting too dark it's just that i'm lightening inside like the pads of the lip now uh another fun part is kind of adding like little freckles and tiny splotches so that's what i'm doing here you can see my alpha's tiny now and then just uh spraying those around a really really tiny alpha now so this is almost like moles or even more freckles and you know you can just spray this over and over but you see just layering right just tons of various kinds of noise just like random patterns splotchiness color and it might look a little too much in this view but just like based on my experience i know that this is gonna look okay plus another thing to keep in mind i connect this stuff to like color correction nodes in arnold and which gives me like full control so i'm never too worried it's actually better to go too far than not far enough because then you know just with easy color correction tools even photoshop you'd be able to make those connections so exported that big map bringing it in now as a file texture and then these color maps get connected to the subsurface color of the material so we can see what it looks like as a solid color and then once the texture is connected you can see the difference looks a lot more alive now and you can see i mean we're not doing a full render yet uh i will just to test things out but you can see how the uh like the splotchiness and everything it doesn't seem as strong once it's attached to a subsurface material everything becomes a lot more subtle and it just gives a lot more interest to the light a lot more interest to the skin in general and helps to look more natural and believable okay so now let's jump into doing some grooming uh more questions i got on the hair and stuff so i am using xgen which ships with the later versions of maya so i'm going through a quick process here so doing a selection mask on some faces creating a new x-gen description and then adding it to a new collection which is going to be for her adding some of these guide curves this is the method i use most doing the um the traditional xgen and then using guide curves so uh placing them bending them right now changing the thickness so we'll just reason through this because this is also this is just a general practice and i'm doing that over and over so i just thought i would show you you know the painting of the mask which is the density mask and then a little trick that i like to do is i use a little expression okay running clumps now so another thing that's common so i'll do multiple clumps but here i am starting to polish it a little bit already where i'm adding a smaller density around the edges and then i'm putting in a little expression here that makes the less dense parts thinner so that helps me blend the hairs so i like doing that i pretty much do that on all my grooms and now doing some test renders so assigning the uh arnold hair shader which is great by far the best hair shader i've ever used so it's always fun to use that and then yeah here i am tweaking i got the render open so then i do the same deal for the short hairs which are on her head again selecting the faces adding a description and in the guide curves and then here we go then i'm going to tweak the density the thickness and then add clumps i'll usually add around three levels of clumps you know when it comes to grooming it's a huge huge subject and there's literally artists whose full-time job it is is to groom and they do obviously much better job than me but can't really cover it in a small video it might be something i do in the future i'm getting a lot of questions about the hair i can tell you that it takes me a long time uh on this project it might have been the most time consuming thing would be the hair you're looking at right now the main hairstyle and that's just because there's a lot of different skills and also you know i'm not the best with x-gen i would say especially making clumps i think that's really where the skill and the craftsmanship comes in when i'm admiring other people's grooms it has a lot to do with the characteristics and the detail in their clumps but you know just putting down curves and styling it um you know i can do that so that's that's what i spent a lot of my time doing and then i'm doing a lot of back and forth like you're seeing now on the details inside the clumps the noise inside um i use a lot of randomness so because the way i'm doing it is so procedural you know i'm just tweaking a lot to see what it looks like so showing you now a little bit of how i'm doing some of the coloring so i'm using um two different methods actually i knew i wanted a gradient like her hair was dyed and i knew i wanted to be really bold color like pink so that's what i'm doing here i'm using curves and i'm plugging that in and then later i add a i actually make like a one-to-one color map and then i use that to drive the color of the hair and that gives me the different dyed clumps so that mixed with the gradient i actually add purple into the gradient too then i get this pretty complex hairstyle with all these different kind of colors which i was really satisfied with i'm happy how that came out all right next up let's take a closer look at the way i did the makeup one of the most common questions i got was about the makeup particularly the eye the eye and the lips are done in a similar way so i thought i would talk a little bit about that and show you know my process so first up uh i thought i would address you know some people ask me why not just put it in the texture so if they were doing a game character absolutely i would do it that way so the method i chose to do was to ultimately the skin of her her head the shader was a layered shader so the skin shader you saw me developing earlier is one of the layers and then i created layers for the eye makeup i eventually created a layer for a mascara like an eyeliner and then i created a layer for the lips and inside those layers are some complicated materials too in some cases a layered uh shader that's plugged into a layer shader so it gets pretty complex eventually but the reason why i'm doing that is because i get ultimate resolution and then in terms of texture maps in terms of one-to-one texture maps i only i'm only using one and that's the mask and so i just painted that in zbrush you know where i want the makeup to be and then i'm using procedurals and just arnold shading stuff you know in the hypershade to create the look so in the case of the mascara it's uh you know i wanted to do this like glitter blue i ended up opting to do something using ai flakes which is a node in arnold they use it for car paint that's the i think that's the number one use of it that's what i chose to do for the glitter so eventually i end up building the look with two ai flakes you know one that's more silvery one that's more blue i'm editing those procedural nodes to get the kind of normal variation color variation you know i found some high resolution images uh to base off of so eventually i settled on keeping all the skin detail in there and just trying to make it look like it's kind of like paint and that there's glitter stuff in there you never get too close to the render so i think the ai flakes node workflow kind of worked out eventually um for the look i was going for but it would have been pretty badass to actually have glitter geometry on there and the lip same deal so the lips i built a material that is just glossy and then i added some ai flakes in there to make it look like a kind of glitter lip gloss again i painted that mask in zbrush so yeah the reason why i did the layered shader thing gives me ultimate control and ultimate resolution if i were doing it all in the texture i wouldn't be able to dynamically update it in the scene like this but then also everything would have had to be a map you know the metalness the the actual glitter would have had to be pixels so by doing procedurals doing everything in the shaders and just using these one-to-one masks that are really simple uh i can also even use color correction nodes and levels and stuff to even refine the masks inside arnold so you know the least the thing that needs the least amount of resolution is the only one-to-one map and everything else is procedural so that's why i did it that way and that's how i made the makeup okay a couple final bits just to wrap everything up i wanted to mention that i textured the leather collar in substance painter so it's the one thing that's textured outside of zbrush i actually spent a little bit of time and i made a leather smart material just out of you know spare parts from substance so it was a 100 procedural type of thing i applied it to the collar again automatically unwrapped it and then i polished it tweaked the attributes so that it fit and then i exported that and that's what i used to texture the leather collar around her neck the tattoo was a mixture of a pattern that i whipped up in photoshop and i applied that in zbrush to get started and then i polished that all up just by normal painting brushes in zbrush and then i kind of finished it off and made it a little bit more unique on her head and that's how i did the tattoo that's just mixed with the subsurface color with her skin in arnold and to finish it off i added a couple more bits of jewelry a diamond nose ring a barbell in her ear and then i did a quick rig so that i could pose her a little bit more she was just way too straight and once i had all this stuff on there all the groom and everything it made the most sense to just do a quick rig so i can move her head and tilt it a little bit to make the portrait a little bit more uh dynamic and make her feel a little bit more alive oh and uh keanu so that's how i finished up this scene once i had everything done and i was ready to do the final renders i updated my render settings to do more samples i increased the resolution and then i let it run i had four setups so that was four images total and the final renders took over five hours each so it was the better part of a day and when i do those kinds of long renders i am still a little bit nervous hoping that it'll all work out and it'll look good when it's finished and this time i was happy with how they turned out all right that's it for today's video i hope you enjoyed it i hope you learned something and that you could take away and using your own projects i hope you found it entertaining and informative a little bit i got some more things coming up so thank you guys so much for the support you've been showing me recently i'm glad you're enjoying the content thank you for the comments and suggestions on things to tackle uh with some of the questions we didn't get to in some of the bigger topics i think they're gonna make for better videos down the road that are just for those topics like um displacement rendering and arnold i think we could do a video totally on skin detailing and then i've got some other project ideas in the works so i'm just going to try to keep this ball rolling you know let's let's just try to keep making stuff so if you did like this video please do hit that like button subscribe if you want to see more videos like this and i'll catch you in the next one peace out

Channel: J Hill

Views: 100,711

Rating: 4.9663863 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 99SJ03IqpVo

Length: 41min 45sec (2505 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020