Self portrait

Self-portrait time

For this semester my biggest goal was to sculpt and model more. I didn’t get to do it too much during semester one so this time around I wanted to sculpt so much I’d almost get sick of it! In previous years I had this image in my head that I could just sit in front of my laptop and sculpt anything but very quickly realised I really couldn’t do it at all. I know the basics already but what I’m lacking is consistency in my sculpting. I end up sculpting a nice piece and the next three are rubbish. I’m also still extremely slow, as I keep double-checking and browsing the internet for solutions when I get stuck. So to be able to overcome those I need to keep practising, over and over again until the process is stuck in my muscle memory. I know I’m capable of reaching this goal eventually, as I’m willing to keep pushing and not give up if there’s something I really want.

Dunning Kruger effect

So, to begin this gruesome journey I decided to motivate myself with small goals I’ll be able to reach weekly. I got the idea from Follygon’s 30-day sculpting challenge. Instead of sculpting for 30 days straight (as I really don’t have time to spend every day sculpting because of my modules) I will aim to sculpt one character/item per week. This will hopefully end up with me being faster and more efficient in sculpting in the last week of this semester. I will not think about the full pipeline for now but focus solely on the sculpting process to obtain the needed skills to call myself a somewhat effective sculptor.

To help me with this journey I bought two Follygon tutorials from Gumroad; Lighting and Rendering in Blender with Follygon and Sculpting The Planes of the Head | In-Depth Tutorial. The first one is important mostly due to a chapter where Follygon explains how I can export models from ZBrush with polypaint and minimal retopology by just using FBX exporter and Zremesher. With these methods and the GOZ bridge between Blender and ZBrush I learned earlier I feel like I’ve unlocked a forbidden God Tier of knowledge.

So, to kick start this challenge of mine I decided to make a bit more detailed model than what I’m intending for the rest of them to be. I have an Instagram page for my art that I haven’t touched in years, so I decided to revive it for the sake of future job hunting. I wiped it clean from the old works and took on the task to create a new profile picture, aka self-portrait in 3D. I spend most of my time in my office, so I wanted to include parts of it in the portrait too. I had to twist the reality a little, however, since I wanted my character to have the wallpaper as her background so I had to pretend for the sake of the render that I usually sit my back towards it.

Since I didn’t want to keep looking into the mirror 247 nor wanted the end result to be too realistic anyway, I decided to use a cartoon filter on my existing selfies and use those as a reference. There was also the advantage of the filters making everyone look like a Disney princess, so I wasn’t complaining. I also still had the horrid bobblehead version of myself burnt deep in my memory, so I wasn’t too keen on revisiting the realism just yet.

The sculpting process was pretty straightforward, I was still slow, but compared to the speed I used to be last year I was pleased to see some significant improvement. There definitely was the familiar “oh my god kill it with fire”-moment as the sculpt progressed, but instead of giving up, I kept going as the number one thing everyone seems to be saying about sculpting is that it will get progressively worse before it gets better. And so happened. It surely didn’t look much like me, but there was some small resemblance which I was super happy about. It meant I had progressed in likeness too, be it only slightly.

After the sculpting was more or less done, I poly painted the skin and added eyelashes and eyebrows. I did a quick zremesh so that the polygons were max 1 million and continued to the tutorial Follygon had for the FBX export. The process was very easy, I just needed to install one script in the Zstartup folder and then use ZBrush’s own FBX export under zplugin. I exported the selected mesh and imported it into Blender. So that the polypaint would show in Blender, I had to reset the material values to normal, unlink the normal map and add an attribute node in shading with “Col” written on it. Ta-da and the polypaint was transferred.

The next step was hair. I had already heard of using curve paths in Blender for hair, so I wanted to try this on my model. I watched a Hair with curves tutorial from Pancake_Manicure. The process was again very simple; add a path curve, align it with the surface, then add a path circle and from the curve path settings add the circle as the bevel object. This creates a tube around the path that can then be modified easily. This method lets me add strands of hair very quickly and with the possibility to edit them later on compared to the difficulty of doing it in ZBrush. I kept on going until I had a head full of hair.

The hair tutorial also showed how to shade the hair effectively, so I followed it to create the semi-realistic-looking node tree shader for the hair. I next watched How to Create Realistic Eyebrows in Blender in 4 Minutes by PixelicaCG and created eyebrows using hair particles.

At this point, I quickly went back to ZBrush to add some more skin detail and a bit cheekier smile, as I felt like the character was a little too bland.

Back to Blender. Now that the character was mostly done (minus the torso of course), I wanted to focus on the background. It was quite easy to model as I was sitting in the exact same spot I wanted to model, so I had plenty of real-life references around me. I started off with the table and a wall, slowly making my way around the items on the shelves like the plant and the globe. For the plant, I used particle effects and weight painting and for the hustle sign, I used the 3D text converted to mesh and emission ranked up a little for the glow. Of course, I also added the Groke and Snorkmaiden from last semester too as small Easter eggs and modelled a quick Cintiq with a lit-up screen for a light effect from below.

Instead of using png textures, I decided to texture everything with nodes instead, since that is something I also wanted to learn to master eventually. I went to google and to Blender forums to look for tutorials on how to make each surface and was happy to find loads of information on them. Wood texture for the table, a badly painted Moomin mug and fabric for the curtains. For the wallpaper, I took a photo of my actual wall and brought it in through Photoshop. This ended up being kind of pointless since I chose to go with a very open aperture for the depth of field, but the effort was still there. I also figured out how to texture the leather chair before quick lighting and hitting the render for the first time.

I was super excited about how the render was looking, so I went ahead and did an interesting lego body and exported it to ZBrush for cleanup. After a quick sweater sculpt I brought the mesh back to Blender and textured it with a soft fuzzy texture. Cosy! Now that I had the torso in place I was finally able to sculpt the remaining hands. I wanted the pose to be “delightedly surprised” as if the character would be mid-working on something on her Cintiq.

After some hand nightmares I exported them too to Blender with polypaint and the scene was finished! I did a few tweaks on the lights and render settings and hit the render button for the last time. Holy heck, I was happy. Not only that the render looked really neat, but I actually made something from the ground up and ended up with a decent-looking result. I couldn’t help but compare it to the very first render I exported from Blender and was immensely happy with how much I had progressed. The lighting in this scene was pretty spot on, I really like all the small details I added even though they’re pretty much lost in the blur and I really like how the character turned out too. In the future, I’d like to make version two with hair particles hair instead of curves, but for now, I like the cartoony look of it.

I was also happy with the time it took. I finished the render in four days, which is a massive personal record for me. It gave me so much confidence to realise, that I can actually do a good job in less time. And as time progresses, I’ll be even quicker and more effective. I’ll most likely look at this piece in a year with humour and think to myself how unskilled I used to be, but for, at this very moment, I’m very much proud of myself.