Gerard Butler
Digital Portrait for Film
— PROJECT NAME
Gerard Butler
— ROLE
Modelling, Sculpting, Texturing, Grooming, Lighting, Look Development
— SOFTWARE
Mudbox, zBrush, Maya, Arnold, Marvelous Designer, Mari, XGEN
Here is my second digital portrait. This project was developed under the guidance of my mentor, Peter Zoppi.
Portraiture is one of my primary interests, and Gerard Butler is one of my favourite actors. This project was chosen so I could learn more about anatomy, materials and surfacing. Clean base meshes were developed inside Maya and then brought into zBrush and Mudbox for further development.
Mudbox was preferred for facial sculpting due to its standard layer system, cameras, and materials. The body was refined inside zBrush. All of the armour, leather, weapons, etc, were built inside Maya where I utilized the creasing tools. Marvelous Designer was briefly used for the cape. XGEN Core is where I developed the groom.
Mari was utilized extensively for all of the surfacing. I initially started with creating the displacement through the bump channel. Mostly leveraging procedurals and assets from my texture library. I was then able to drive the look and feel of further channels.
Wireframe
Developed from clean base meshes.
UV Layout
8k UDIMS for the portrait & 4k UDIMS for everything else.
Groom Guides
Front View
Groom Guides
Side View
Groom
Front View
Groom
Side View
Mari Node Graph Snapshot
Mari was used for all of the surfacing. I leveraged the Material System, and built everything from the ground up, using the Node Graph.
Starting with the base skin diffuse, Texturing XYZ Microskin was then laid out for each region of the body. All of the dirt and blood were hand projected on their respective layers and layered upon the base skin.
Leather and armour were built similarly. Procedural nodes were utilized to generate displacement to drive the colour channels. Blends between procedural creation and sculpted details from zBrush were used.
zBrush Anatomy Sculpture Snapshot
My digital sculpting technique drastically changed during this project, for the better. Previously, I would primarily sculpt with an assortment of brushes, ie, clay tubes, clay buildup, move, dam standard, dynamesh, etc. This marked my first project with only using the Standard brush. It was very challenging in the beginning, but, ultimately it has given more control over creating and manipulating form. Each subdivision layer was slowly built up at a time.
Mudbox Portraiture Snapshot
Mudbox was used for all of the facial sculpting. It took some adjustment, especially using the Sculpt brush. Mudbox is now my preferred sculpting package, especially for faces, due to its comfortable brushes, real cameras, materials, and the layer system.