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Description
I was browsing some very impressive portraits of 3D modeled people on Artstation. Of course I got inspired and wanted to learn how they made those. That started a few month long journey where I refreshed my 3D skills as I hadn't used any 3D tools for a few years.

I had an unnecessarily complex process with this one as I was exploring different techniques. It started with a 3D scan from 3dscanstore, which I then used as a reference to sculpt a Daz G8F base character in Blender. When the sculpt was close enough I used a shrink wrap modifier to match the scan. Textures were also baked into the base mesh using Cycles baking tool. Then I took the Daz character into Character Creator 3, but all I did was play around with the pose. In my next project I'm planning to use it for texturing too instead of using a texture from a scan.

Then I took it back into Blender where I tried adding a hair. My first attempt was using particle hair and the results were terrible. Then I tried using hair cards which was better but still not good enough. I tried adding some particle hair on top of the hair cards to get more details and that did improve the results. After a few attempts I was also able to replace the hair cards with particle hair too. In my next project I should try using even thinner hair strands and just add more of them. Shading the hair also needed a lot of experimentation. I'm glad I wathced a tutorial on cgcookie because that made me realize my hair shading wasn't good enough. Using just the principled hair BSDF is not going to give realistic results. The hair color needs to change along the strand, and you also need some color variation to the locks. This can be done using some voronoi texture and mix nodes.

Skin shading was another difficult task and I'm still not happy with the results. I tried a few different node setups I found around the net and I will continue experimenting with those in my future projects.

When doing some final touches in Photoshop I accidently stumbled into something awesome: trying the new neural filters I managed to have AI replace the eyes and the mouth for more realistic results! I will use this technique in the future to check what kind of ajustments I need to do to the 3D model to match the resuls generated by AI. This time I was lazy and didn't bring those changes back to 3D. I also didn't have the smallest details in my normal map (will add those when texturing in Character Creator next time) so I used another AI to generate those. It happened by scaling the image to 25% and then doing a 4x upscale in Gigapixel. That nicely generates some skin pores which I then added back to my original image.

Some minor touchups were also added in Krita. Mainly just some flyaway hairs that could've been added as particle hair too. I promise to use less post processing in my next project

Description
I was browsing some very impressive portraits of 3D modeled people on Artstation. Of course I got inspired and wanted to learn how they made those. That started a few month long journey where I refreshed my 3D skills as I hadn't used any 3D tools for a few years.

I had an unnecessarily complex process with this one as I was exploring different techniques. It started with a 3D scan from 3dscanstore, which I then used as a reference to sculpt a Daz G8F base character in Blender. When the sculpt was close enough I used a shrink wrap modifier to match the scan. Textures were also baked into the base mesh using Cycles baking tool. Then I took the Daz character into Character Creator 3, but all I did was play around with the pose. In my next project I'm planning to use it for texturing too instead of using a texture from a scan.

Then I took it back into Blender where I tried adding a hair. My first attempt was using particle hair and the results were terrible. Then I tried using hair cards which was better but still not good enough. I tried adding some particle hair on top of the hair cards to get more details and that did improve the results. After a few attempts I was also able to replace the hair cards with particle hair too. In my next project I should try using even thinner hair strands and just add more of them. Shading the hair also needed a lot of experimentation. I'm glad I wathced a tutorial on cgcookie because that made me realize my hair shading wasn't good enough. Using just the principled hair BSDF is not going to give realistic results. The hair color needs to change along the strand, and you also need some color variation to the locks. This can be done using some voronoi texture and mix nodes.

Skin shading was another difficult task and I'm still not happy with the results. I tried a few different node setups I found around the net and I will continue experimenting with those in my future projects.

When doing some final touches in Photoshop I accidently stumbled into something awesome: trying the new neural filters I managed to have AI replace the eyes and the mouth for more realistic results! I will use this technique in the future to check what kind of ajustments I need to do to the 3D model to match the resuls generated by AI. This time I was lazy and didn't bring those changes back to 3D. I also didn't have the smallest details in my normal map (will add those when texturing in Character Creator next time) so I used another AI to generate those. It happened by scaling the image to 25% and then doing a 4x upscale in Gigapixel. That nicely generates some skin pores which I then added back to my original image.

Some minor touchups were also added in Krita. Mainly just some flyaway hairs that could've been added as particle hair too. I promise to use less post processing in my next project