Technique focus
Incredible 3D artists take us behind their artwork
EL CUCUY Software Houdini, Karma, ZBrush, Substance Painter, XYZ Texturing Year made 2022
CHARACTER LIKENESS STUDY I started this project as a likeness study to improve my facial sculpting skills. I chose Tony ‘El Cucuy’ Ferguson to challenge myself as he has very interesting and unique facial features. To add to the challenge I also chose to put him in a dynamic pose. One mistake that I made is that I posed the model too early before being happy with the level of likeness, which made it difficult to tweak the facial features. I would advise against posing the model before getting the likeness to a good point. After that I started exploring the Karma render engine that ships with Houdini and Solaris, and I thought to test it out. Karma proved to be a very good and fast render engine. XYZ textures were vital for achieving a realistic skin look. The look for the sweat drops and blood were incredibly challenging to achieve as they required procedural modelling in Houdini combined with custom painted maps, and a good understanding of the transmission component in the shader.