A little over a year ago I set out on a new project with the idea to brush up on some of my 3D character skills. I wanted to focus on improving texturing and grooming workflows, but also put some thought towards the design of the character and include some kind of story telling element; whether that were to be a fictional character, or based on a person of historical relevance. I came across a famous pirate on a history podcast; she was called Zheng Yi Sao. She’s known for being one of the most powerful and successful pirates in the history books, who terrorised the South China Sea during the 19th century. She had a really interesting story to her life which inspired me to put together a portrait based on her character. She has featured in film and television with the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean and Doctor Who. There’s very little visual documentation of how she looked in real life, which was helpful to me in some ways as I had more creative licence to steer the design towards my own ideas. However, this also allowed me to change the design as often as I liked, which added extra time to the project for exploring ideas. Character design is an area I would like to improve on going forward so I was happy to take on the challenge.
The project took over a year to complete – roughly two months if I were to count up the hours spent on it. For this project breakdown, I have decided to split it into four parts. This first post will be focused on the initial sculpting, texturing and grooming process for her face.
Sculpting
Sculpting is always my favourite stage of the process. I like to make a point of starting from a simple sphere each time with the aim to continue improving my knowledge of form, structure and anatomy. The head model went through many iterations; it was quite a challenge to nail the key features and facial structure specific to her ethnicity. Also, I wasn’t working from any one piece of reference which allowed me to work more freely and explore her character, however it also meant I lacked direction at times and a result the process took a lot longer.
See below a ZBrush time-lapse of the early sketching stages for the head model.
One sculpting reference I found very useful was the Asaro head (by Adam Fisher). This helped me to identify key planes changes of the face and get a better understanding of the primary forms. I lit the Asaro head with a basic lighting setup (above) and used the renders in my reference board.
Occasionally when sculpting a character I like to spend extra time studying a specific area of the face, just as an opportunity to learn and improve. On this character I put some extra time into working on the lips. There are so many interesting forms to that area of the face – a great subject for detailing practice.
Texturing
For the texturing and skin detailing aspects of the portrait I decided to experiment with the VFace workflow from Texturing XYZ. I have seen some amazing results from artists using their data sets and felt inspired to purchase a pack and try it myself. I was really impressed by the results and how easy it was to setup. I used Faceform Wrap to transfer the maps from the VFace model to my custom topology. The I followed this tutorial from Texturing XYZ to set up the skin shader.
For the colour map, I made quite a lot of adjustments to the original VFace scan. I removed some of the skin blemishes, added a makeup pass and some facial tattoos. For the tattoos, the symbols I chose have some relevance to the life of Zheng Yi Sao. The three dots symbolise family; her son, husband and herself. The remaining tattoo’s around her eyes and forehead were taken from the ship of a Chinese pirate ship similar to one she would have used. Also, she has a kraken on her neck which has no relevance to her personally other than the fact she is a pirate.
Grooming
For the groom I used XGen for Maya. One improvement on this project compared to my previous attempts at XGen hair is the transition hairs on her forehead. Good transition hairs can immediately make a character more believable. I decided to try breaking up this area into multiple descriptions to allow for more control.
See below a time-lapse showing my full process for the groom on this character.
I have always had a love/hate relationship with XGen and this latest project definitely solidified these feelings. Unfortunately my grooming scene for this character became very buggy and I somehow lost all the painted maps that control the density, region masks, etc. Due to this happening I wasn’t able to push the look of the hair quite as far as I would have liked. Despite these challenges, I am still pretty happy with how her hair turned out.
That concludes this first stage of my project breakdown. In the next chapter I will be covering some of the steps used to pose the character, such as facial shape modelling and some basic rigging workflows. If you found this post interesting, stay tuned for the next one coming soon. To see more on this project you can check out the highlights on my instagram page – click here.