Making the Digital Portrait of Mr. Obamaby Anto Juričić Toni, Bosnia and Herzegovina



Base Mesh - Hi my name is Toni and I am going to walk you through the process of making digital portrait. Making a digital portrait can be very difficult task if not prepared well, so my first advice will be to get a lot of  references  for your project. Since my project was related to well  known public person, finding good references was easy task but it was impossible to find images that could be useful for assembling  good image plains so I relied mostly on eyeballing techniques.

With all my personal project I try to learn as much as I can  so I often change pipeline and workflow as well. Don't be afraid to try some new techniques  and apps since technology is growing every day giving us  opportunity to work more efficiently. In this project I will be switching between  Maya, ZBrush, Silo, Uv layout and Photoshop.

First thing I did was building simple base mesh in Silo using smoothed cube primitive and extruding few faces from bottom to make neck volume and shoulders.



Than I import base mesh as .obj file in ZBrush and started the sculpting. In this stage I was  focused on overall shape and volume of model and I was not concerned with likeness features.  My goal was to make good human bust sculpt and build new topology over that hi-res sculpt. That way I can have more efficient edge flow for further sculpting.



When it comes to remeshing your sculpt there is many good solutions. I could use ZBrush Z-sphere or even Topogun but I've decided to do it in Silo which also have some nice tools for that task. After laying down new topology I quickly  realigned my base mesh with reference image using move brush in Silo. After half hour of pushing and pulling I had good base mesh with some decent percent of likeness I can further refine in ZBrush.




Have to revisit it later. In sculpting process mesh can be deformed behind  point where your polygons align with distortion free UV's so I will revisit this problem. Before adding more details to mesh I often do UV part. For that task I use great app called UV layout.  I don't spent  much time on UV's at this point because I will do it after completing this model.

For well trained artist task of building base mesh in such way can take between 1-2 hours. This mesh can be used in many other project because it have god mesh structure and volume.