zbrush facial anatomy and likeness character sculpting

I’m definitely looking forward to the next project and tackling new challenges as well…But making a realistic likeness real-time like this has been a bucket list item for me since I got into the industry back in 2008. I’m confident future likeness attempts will go much faster since the majority of this time has gone towards research and learning. So I picked up this Ryan Gosling Likeness one more time and now about a year later it’s finally done. I needed more knowledge with Marvelous Designer, Xgen, and Unreal 5 which just came out around that time. After completing that project and leveraging Marmoset Real-Time look dev, there was still a lot more work ahead. I knew I still wasn’t ready to tackle the Ryan Gosling likeness yet so I tried an easier (hairless) subject Michael Clark Duncan: The Green Mile. A year later I found an opportunity to learn more in a course: “Likeness and Facial anatomy” with Marlon Nunez. At the time I hadn’t used Marvelous designer, xgen, and Unreal 5 didn’t even exist.

The likeness part was a side note to the anatomy study, but at the end of the course I realized I would need to tackle all kinds of challenges in order to make the Ryan Gosling likeness at a level I felt proud of. I actually started working on this in a cgma character facial sculpting course 3 years ago with Laura Gallagher. Phew… This was a very long and challenging project for me. programs I used was Pureref, photoshop, Knald, Rizom UV, and Davinci Resolve. Of course Unreal engine, but also used Marmoset 4 for look dev. Marvelous designer for the shirt, jacket and pants. Xgen (Maya) was used for the hair then exported as splines to Unreal for some real-time fanciness (Shout out to JHill for the youtube vids! ). I used zbrush for the sculpt, zwrap and 3d scan store for pores and some of the base body anatomy (re-sculpted for pose) and as a starting place for diffuse texture. An attempt at a realistic likeness of Ryan Gosling in the film Bladerunner 2049, Rendered real-time in Unreal Engine 5.

Zbrush facial anatomy and likeness character sculpting