Fusion of 3D and 2D

Fusion of  3D and 2D 

This fun project was about combining 3D modeling and my 2D art style into one artsy looking male bust.

Because it is a school project I only had one week to finish this but I learned so much and enjoyed this process a lot!

Hope you enjoy it :)

Ideas and references

This time I really wanted to create something very stylized and try to achieve a hand painted look with brushstrokes. I have seen this 2D looking style of 3D getting more popular so I wanted it give it a try. Because my 2D art style looks close to what I was planning on doing, I wanted to implement it on a 3D model. Also I wanted to create a human head because I have not sculpted one till this point. So combining these two ideas was the perfect plan and I think the stylized male head fits perfectly to the scribble texturing style.

For my first time modeling a human head references were more than necessary. Getting the anatomy right even in a stylized project is very important. In the end I had many human references but also different art styles as reference for the texturing part.

Sculpting

I started as always by collecting all my references and  blocking out the main shapes in ZBrush.

For the hair I made use of some XMD Brushes and worked with the dynamic system of ZBrush to create the clothes.

Adding details and creating the UVs was the next step before I could bake the highpoly onto the lowpoly version in substance. Then I hand painted all my textures, mainly using the Archieve Inker brush to achieve the hand painted and scribbly look.

Texturing

To break the silhouette and really evoke the feeling of a 2D painting I added the extra brush strokes by creating a slightly bigger geo and working with opacity maps, making the strokes float above the actual model.

Final thoughts 

For me doing stylized textures is way more fun and I am definitely excited to do it again. 

But I did the mistake of not utilizing UDIMs which lead to slightly low resolution areas on my textures. For future projects I will check how many UDIMs are necessary for optimal texel density depending on how close the asset will be placed to the camera.

I really enjoyed getting a completely new feel for my model, the curves and edges, how the light reacts and where shadows would be by hand painting the textures. It gave me so much more artistic freedom which was a good change of pace.

Softwares I used for this project:
- ZBrush  [sculpting]
- Maya [set/rendering]
- Render: Arnold 
- Substance Painter [texturing]
- Nuke [compositing]
- DaVinci Resolve [video editing]

Thanks for reading :)