Character artist Satoshi Arakawa demonstrates how he created a stylised portrait in real time using PBR materials
This tutorial will demonstrate how to create a stylised portrait from a concept illustration (concept art by Nutsa Avaliani). The goal is to create something that is stylised in nature while utilising PBR materials to give it a realistic feel. The real challenge is to add a fluffy look to the softer materials, without having to rely on actual fur strand geometry like in film or offline rendered pieces.
So we will focus on how to accomplish this using techniques applicable in a real-time setting. We will begin in ZBrush to sculpt something that will work well with our low-poly techniques in Substance Painter and Marmoset.
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01 BLOCK OUT THE BASIC SHAPES
The first step is to block in your shapes to get a feeling for how you will translate the concept into 3D. Before even tackling the details, it’s important to establish your forms or the details won’t really be effective. In order to match the forms you see in the illustration, use DynaMesh or the move tool – these will prove to be the most useful tools at this stage of sculpting. Now you need to block in very basic shapes of all the elements; try not to match the concept too closely at this juncture.
02 SCULPT THE FACE
Although the focus for this tutorial will be the soft materials, the face is still the focal point. In this case achieving a cute, adolescent face can be quite challenging. Make sure you have a lot of reference on the age group you are trying to achieve. With a young face, you will want to keep details rather soft and the anatomy more round to really sell the youthful vibe. Slowly build up your forms using a brush like Clay Buildup. You can add some subtle details like pores at the end. 01 03
03 MODEL THE CAP
The easiest way to accomplish this is to create a basic shape of the cap that is perfectly round. Use Maya or 3ds Max to model something like this. Once you have your round cap geo, you’ll want to use radial symmetry in ZBrush. Because the pattern on the cap is complicated, we want to take a shortcut here and only sculpt a section of it.
Using radial symmetry set to something like 8, we can accomplish this by only sculpting 1/8th of the cap. F
