Zig Head Breakdown (Patreon)

Here's a quick breakdown for anyone who's interested.

I started by taking a crap ton (like 400ish) of photos of Zig from every angle, on a cloudy day -- the clouds help flatten the lighting. You want shadows and such kept to a minimum.

Then I threw the photos into a program called MeshRoom. It takes all the photos and then uses magic to interpret them into a 3D model! And it's free, too!

And we're done!

Heh, nope. The model comes out looking like absolute garbage. Because photo-scanning fur is pretty much impossible. Photo-scanning apps love smooth, non-shiny objects. So layered fur AND a shiny nose... not a great result (If you notice, the nose is completely missing. It's too shiny.)

So why bother? It helps me get all of the proportions... at least mostly. How wide the head is, where the ears are, etc.

So now, I sculpt a model from scratch using this photo-scan as reference. Sometimes I even lay the meshes on top of each other to get the proportions right where I want them.

Then we retopologize. That basically means covering the sculpt in a low-res mesh "skin". Picture stretching a sock over a foot. The sock isn't the foot itself, but it takes on the shape of the foot, and it's much less complicated.

Then we use ZBrush (idk if Blender even has this feature) to bake all of the finer details back onto the mesh as a displacement map. Now, when I render those details will be read from this texture map and magically added to the mesh. It's great for stuff like skin pores, pimples, etc. when making detailed meshes, while keeping the mesh itself low-poly for easy animation.

Then we use all those high-res photos we took to texture the head. I prefer to use Substance Painter. It has a "stencil" mode, where you can grab a photo and project pieces of it onto a mesh.

Then we get the head into Maya and use XGen to build the fur groom. Rough one at first. Just get the basic feel of the fur, basic lengths. Fur grooming is an awful, time-consuming thing that took me months and months to learn. I can link to some courses if anyone is interested, but it's unfortunately not something I want to explain in detail, as it would take a literal book to do so, and there are groomers WAY better than me who have made way better courses for it.

Then, we make the fur shaders. Fortunately, we can just recycle the albedo texture map from the mesh itself and use a hair shader of your choice. Just as with the rest of the groom, it's all about tweaking. Looking at refs and tweaking til it looks right. Add some opacity, subtract some opacity. Darken it up, lighten it up. Make it a bit thicker, thinner, etc.

And lastly, we make blend shapes (shape keys for any Blender users) for the facial expressions. Some people use armatures, but I personally think facial expressions are way too intricate for bones. With blend shapes, I can go in and really tweak the cheek dimples, and such.

And that's it! Ready to be animated.

(I'll make another behind the scenes for compositing. Because the next step is to actually put this head into some live action footage and see if I can convincingly make it look like I'm wearing it on my head)