Making of 3D Female Portrait | Maya - ZBrush - MARI - Substance Painter - Wrap - Arnold

hello everyone thank you for joining me today so let's kick it off with the concept sculpt I usually start sculpting from a base mesh but for this tutorial I decided to start with a sphere since I haven't done that in a while the goal at this stage is to form a good clay mesh as a starting point with the main landmarks then slowly add and introduce more features on the model as you can see I'm a big fan of lus method for blocking out the head so I'm using the sphere for the cranium And the cylinder for the neck adding lines to Mark the hairline nose and the bottom of the chin helps me get everything in place I add the ear shape early on I find it very helpful when blocking out the overall proportions of the head and from there I continue to adjust the face planes the cheekbone Cabella the jaw and so on these are the main landmarks I focus on at the early stages it help in getting the proportions of the head and neck roughly in place now dropping the landmarks for the eye socket frontal bone on the forehead nose then the cheekbone and then slowly with these landmarks you'll see the head is starting to take shape now I move on to another layer of primary and secondary shapes then add Sphere for the eyeballs so I can start shaping the eyelids and bring more forms to the face the scalp at this stage doesn't look appealing at all it usually takes a couple iterations to shape the right head you have in mind or trying to reference and that's normal when you start from a sphere you just need to keep going now jumping to the later stages of the sculpt which is sculpting more of the cheekbone and the nasolabial fold also around the eyes and forehead for this project I didn't want to add many aged qualities to the face which sculpting younger faces is harder than older faces in my experience so I tried to sculpt very well-defined jaol line and less thick nasolabial fold yet very well defined cheekbones and lips and of course avoid adding many wrinkles the ear is probably the most less exciting to sculpt for a lot of us since it's always covered by hair or some type of costume design you have on your character but it's part of the head Anatomy so I always give it a good pass when I start sculping from a sphere usually it comes for free when you start from a base mesh so there won't be much sculpting requirements of that texturing I don't add fine skin details at this stage I usually add skin details at Advanced stages of the model and that's after the final topology and that's also when I break the Symmetry around the eyes nose and lips and few areas on the face the model is not quite there yet but I decided to stop sculpting on dynamis Geo that's the best I can get out of it so I usually pick up sculpting after doing proper topology Maya which is what we're going to look at next the initial pass for the head sculpt is done and it's time for a proper topology you can use your own Bas mesh if you have one there are so many available online nowadays just make sure you have a proper topology if you want to animate it and proper UVS for texture and look Dev I like to block out the topology shell separately then connect them as I go you see I started with the eye topology then the nose then next is the mouth and ear ears and the rest of the head I find it faster and easier to design the polyl this way it's just my personal workflow I take the same approach when I work on designing topology for creatures as well I like to build a low race topology first then use subdivision two from zbrush as a base Mish most of the time I delete the Lowes but sometimes I keep it as a proxy mesh building low res mesh and then subdividing it later helps avoid getting overwhelmed with so many Loops during ret topology and it makes it easier to read and design the polyflow and UV layout as I mentioned earlier nowadays most Studios if not all have their own generic base mesh for humans and animals but I highly encourage you to practice topology every now and then there always going to be a creature or some sort of character that breaks bre the rule and the topology for that character needs to be designed between modeling and rigging here is the final Bas mesh this is subdivision 2 from zbrush after cleaning up with proper UVS laid out I did a few tweaks on this sculp as usual it's always good to sculp on a proper mesh now the head model is ready let's move on to costume design next for the costume I started from sphere again and simply used move brush and other crease brushes I created Myself by building a volume that represent the overall and final shape of the piece then use crease brushes to add details on it there wasn't any special technique to be honest simply create volume reshape duplicate mirror and looking at tens and tens of references a lot of times I duplicated the same piece then move and rescaled it into different location then took another shot at the sculpt I'll show show you how I approached the topology for one of the pieces on the main headpiece which I took pretty much similar approach on all of the costume I like to trace and connect the hard edges first then fill and relax in between sometimes I do the opposite I model the section in between and then connect the hard edges there's no specific logic to it it's just personal preference I guess for this kind of hard surface piece I know a lot of people would like to use Zer meure and it depends on the Cam and what do you want to do with it but I always appreciate clean topology it pays off on you texture and look dep back and zbrush with a clean base mesh a tip I can share with you is to sculpt on the main topology lines this will maintain the mesh volume and make your sculp look sharper I forgot to mention that I do that for the eyelids and the lips as well in fact I use it a lot in my workflow so here's the final model with the final sculpt at this stage we have uh the clean base mesh with clean sculpt and UVS so I'm going to extract this placement and have a quick renderer in Arnold and now we are jumping into Mari to texture the head starting with the Scalera I painted a radial red color as a base first then projected couple of eye photos with the veiny part then I cleaned up some of the veins from the unnecessary areas and added some more around the corners and I usually don't paint the iris on the Scalera I totally take care of that and look de for the iris I usually sculpt it in zbrush in a radial mode but for this tutorial I wanted to experiment with the texture XYZ maps and see how much I can push the final look while using texture XYZ Maps only I ended up loading all the maps in Photoshop and enhancing a few areas on the iris to use it in color spec and displacement as well and of course send it back to Mari for final tweaks to start texturing the head using bface texture Maps we need to transfer the bface head shape to match our female head both meshes needs to be sitting on top of each other perfectly for Mari or any other software to project the maps from one mesh to another to do that I'll be using grap software from face form for this process I would like to give face for company a shout out for the support and for kindly providing a WAP license for this tutorial in the gallery section for face fo wrap you'll see they have multiple sample projects to suit your goals they also have Vace Bas mesh from texture XYZ in the gallery and also sample network if you want to use it to transfer your maps and for this tutorial I'll create a very simple network from scratch just to introduce you to the workflow let's start by loading texture XYZ mesh which is the mesh that has all the texture Maps I'll load my female head which is the head I need to transfer the maps to the third step is to add a select Point pairs node to guide the wrap software in the wrapping process the first input will be the texure XYZ head and the second input will be the female head next we'll need to add wrapping node to run the wrapping process the first input will be the XYZ head then the second input will be our female head then we will pipe the select Point pairs note to the third input which if you notice the color on the pole matches the node now let's switch to the visual Editor to start adding our wrapping points and to make it easier to add points let's click on sync views starting from the eye let's make sure we add the points in the corresponding position on the other mesh for example the same point number and position for the upper eyelid to the upper eyelid on the other mesh the lower eyelid corners and lips ears and inet and so on we don't need so many points the WAP algorithm is really good at taking care of the rest especially for a simple mesh like this one now we are done placing the points in the correct position let's hit compute in the wrap node and watch the magic happen and after the wrap process is done you can see that the texture XYZ mesh matches our female head but with the original XYZ UVS which is what we want you can do the next step in zbrush but wrap has a very powerful node which is the brush node which helps in cleaning up the model and relax few areas to match the source mesh the end result of the WAP note goes into the first input and the second Port is for the source mesh in this case our female head I like to use the relax and move project brushes they move or relax the mesh while projecting at the same time I also use the normal move and relax brushes especially on Digi doubles we often get extra data from the scan that we don't need such as the hair or extra skan mesh data now I'm happy with the final cleaned up model I'll use use the safe geometry node and take it to Mari okay here we are in Mari I started by loading texture XYZ head first and then created a color Channel and then imported the first map into a new layer which is the color map that comes with texture XYZ head the wrap process did a great job the map sitting on the mesh where it should be I can see few areas that needs a little bit of tweaking but I'll do the final cleanup after transferring the map to our female head now we have the XYZ head and the maps ready let's load our female head next we can see they are sitting on top of each other perfectly which is exactly what we want next from the channel menu select transfer in the pop-up menu make sure you select XYZ head from the left and the destination female head on the right then click on the arrow pointing to the right to add the color channel to the transfer list I don't recommend transferring more than one channel at a time each channel will take qu quite a while to transfer so do one channel at a time to avoid crashing Mari so the transfer for the color map is done now I'll go ahead and transfer other Maps the same way and come back when all the maps are transferred and finished okay now we have all the maps from texture XYZ transferred on our model we have color cavity displacement and couple of ID Maps which are going to be very great in look Dev let's dive in and started cleaning up our first time map which is the color map I'm happy with the quality of the maps from texure XYZ there are lots of data to play with in the color and the displacement Maps also other Maps but I always end up doing cleanup passs based on my project requirements I occasionally use colonal brush to completely remove values and enhance the skin look but mainly I'd like to use grade or HSV node then add hide all mask and paint the mask in a few areas for Target adjustment on the skin and I was 100% sure I won't be seeing the top of the head or the back or below the neck so I didn't spend massive effort on cleaning up those areas here is our initial pass for the color map we'll be back for additional tweaks during the look def process for now I'll call it done and move on to the costume texture Maps I decided to texture the costume in substance painter I knew I wanted to create consistent material across the costume and headpiece so I wanted to create a smart material for one piece and then apply it to other pieces with minor adjustments starting with the base layer by enabling the color height rough and middle channels I created a gold-like base then I added AO and curvature maps in the new layers with different colors and mask for each one and then I added hsl perceptive node to control the color and rough and Metal indiv visually next I added a tiled patn layer I masked it with a hand painted mask to design patn placement on the headpiece this method allowed for a quick experimentation with different looks and Designs then I continue tweaking The Mask until I was satisfied with the flow and placement of the patterns on the headpiece and once I'm done I created a smart material from the headpiece and I applied it to the entire costume then replacing the patn alpha with different ones and clearing the original mask then I repainted The Mask to give other pieces a different look while maintaining consistent quality material and design language and finally here is a quick render inside substance painter showcasing the Final maps of the costume in log Dev I usually start from displacement and then build up the Shader by connecting other maps in different stages for the displacement I usually use Maya's default called plus minus average nodes connected to the multiply divide that goes into a displacement node but for this project I wanted to try a different and pretty cool approach I've learned from watching Amy ashes tutorial on the texture XYZ website and after building the displacement Network and connecting my zbrush and XYZ displacement Maps I kept playing with the values to reach the desired displacement look unfortunately there are no magic numbers I can pass to you guys just like anything else in lde we have to experiment with a few different values to reach the final look we are after and here is a look at the skin Shader at the final stages of the log dep I have a IR range note connected to all of the r Maps such as rough spec weight and any mask ID Etc also I have ai color correct nodes connected to any color map I'm using AC's workflow by the way and you can see I'm using AI layer to layer the makeup pads on top of the skin which is a black and white mat app I painted in Mari and connected the layer mixer to show the makeup material only around the eyes then I buil the Shader for the costume to have a first f look Dev of the whole project and from there I kept weaking the maps or the values in ldev there was back and forth between Maya and substance painter as well and we are at the final stage in Nuke not lot of com treatment done since I was happy with the final look de but just like any project he can go for rber tweaking things but I think it is good at this stage to call it done I rendered a few frames from different angles and in Nuke I added minor color tweaks to the skin and the costume then I built a very simple background and then added an overall color correction and it's a wrap for this project I want to thank you for joining me through this character breakdown it was fun for me to work on I hope you enjoy it and hopefully see you in the next one many thanks and take care

Channel: John Saleem

Views: 17,638

Keywords: how to sculpt female head in zbrush, how to model female head in maya, how to texture in mari, how to texture in substance painter, how to render in arnold and maya, vfx breakdown, making of 3d portrait, making of cgi portrait, making of realistic portrait in zbrush, sculpting in zbrush, texture xyz vface, displacment in zbrush, realistic female in zbrush, making of photorealistic 3D portrait, organic modeling in zbrush, texturing characters in substance painter, zbrush, maya, mari

Id: jpSY-RfQj6Q

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2023