Hi,
Todays blog goes a little more technical into the process of head creation.
To begin I extract the head shape from the body blockout, and, choosing suitable reference, a combination of thin faced muscley men and worn torn soldiers, I firstly created a base ref to create from that I can set up on the floor planes, then sculpted the forms, until I was happy.
After I copied the mesh at lowest sub, uved, and used that as the base to place some texture xyz textures and displacements. Below is a link to a full tutorial explaining the process.
The texture edit software i used was substance painter, therefore allowing cloning of the base color, then the displacment and utility maps with the same setttings by dropping in the map to the base channel.
Interesting to note, i made a morph of the face for the texture projection with mouth closed and eyes closed, which i opened again after. I will in the end close the mouth after retopo, or high poly posing, but it simplifies the bake process.
I then polypainted the rest of the face and used pour alphas and micromaps (bought from texture xyz) to create and edit out the hair texture and add the neck details. Added slight variations of color to the eyes and sculpting in more finer details.
I did a similar process for the eyes, again using texture xyz maps, but extracting the pupil area as a mask then texture, that I used in photoshop to place the maps, which I imported back into zbrush for displacement and conversion to polypaint.
These renders I created in keyshot.
The next step is hair, as you can see hes very bald, even his eyelashes. For this step I will use xgen and again will either give breakdowns of the process or show where I learnt the process myself, as above.
