Digi Doubles Actors

Hello everyone! I'm happy to be part of The Rookies 2024 Contest and to share with you my projects during the last months!

Last years i studied character creation for videogames and as you can see in my portfolio i have a few of them.
But this year i wanted to challenge myself on something new. My art style is mostly realistic so i decided to study likeness portraits and digi-double humans!
I am very fascinated by the idea of ​​creating models that challenge the viewer regarding the realism of these models, making him wonder what is real and what is not ( thanks also to technologies we have nowadays).

So what better choice in references than two of my favorite actors?
The first one, as you can see from the thumbnail, it's definitely one of my favourite actors of all times, I grew up with his films during my childhood and he gave me a wonderful passion, namely that of the world of cars. 
There's no much to say about him, everyone knows what a good person he was and well... it's been a long day without you my friend, Paul. Rest in Peace Legend.
In my small way, a tribute to Brian O'Conner.

I hope you like it and i'm open to any kind of feedback about it!

Enjoy!

Second Likeness project for me.

BREAKDOWN:

I've got more experience on likeness sculpt after my first digi double model of Tom Holland that you will find below, and this time i decided to spend more time on gaining references, got references from different angles. PureRef is a game changer for collecting references and i reccommend it to every junior artists out there as me.

For this project, i wanted to push my skills of likeness to the next level and to do that i explored for the first time ZWrap workflow. I bought a male skin bundle from the fantastic 3D Scan Store library, and i think it is a must to achieve hyper realism 3D models.
I started sculpting on ZBrush my model's head, giving this time particular attention to primary shapes and not running on details as on my first likeness projects. My workstation has, fortunatelly, 2 monitors so in one i have my PureRef project with plenty of references found on internet, but i also use the texture spotlight feature inside ZBrush to directly overlay primary references on my model. I spent a lot of time on Paul's mouth and lips, and of course eye shapes. Every person has unique shapes and i think those 3 parts can really make the model stand out and gain that likeness uniqueness.
When i had the primary face shapes on point, i jumped on Marvelous Designer to create his outfit. I decided for an elegant look as on many references he was dressed like this. So i started with a classy white shirt and then a blazer. I exported everything as FBX and started to work on the high poly outfit, but first, as i always do on my clothing workflow, i ZRemeshed both of the garments to get a better topology to work with. I didn't pay so much attention to my topology density, as this project wasn't for real-time purpose. I still put effort on most important edge loops because of textures which i would later applied.
Before sculping tertiary details on garments, i was so excited to try out my textures from 3D Scan Store and i also got a head mesh with uv's from their bundle. SO i started ZWrap my Paul's Head with the 3DScan head to obtain a very good topology with uV's in which i could apply high res 3DScan textures.
I had to make some adjustment on displacement map. Also albedo needs some tweaks to get it look as close as possible to Paul's skin tone and details and for that i used Substance Painter, in which i also created clothes textures.

Then i jumped into Maya to set-up my render scene. I always like to use HDRI Studios for portrait renders like those, and my camera focal lenght was from 100 to 120 depending on angle and distance. I still have to learn so much about lightning, it can change everything about the model and textures.
I created my material's shaders with hypershape nodes and i was finally ready to render!.

After tweaking lights, angles view, cameras, polishing textures, and plenty of renders, i've reached my goal and i was very happy about. but, I felt like I needed to do something more on this project...because Paul Walker has been always special for me and i wanted to push myself into unkown fields and bring my Digi Double model to life! 

I got inspired so much by Sefki Ibrahim's latest projects of face animation. i knew it would be so hard...in fact it was even harder! I wanted so badly to animate my model and this is the reason why i'm uploading my contest's entry at the very last minute!

ANIMATION BREAKDOWN:

Firstly, i created a rig for my model with a manual skin wheight. Then i had to create command curves for my joints using constraints. I tried several moves of the model meanwhile using Key tool on the time slider.
To make the animation really stand out and look alive, i needed to animate eyes. To do that i created blendshape. I jumped again on ZBrush, duplicated my head model and modified eyelids to get them closed. I imported the modified head again in Maya and created so a Blendshape for eyes.
I made a lot of tweaks on my time slider to get the right timing of rotating eyes and opening/closing eyelids to be as realistic as possible on the animation.
After various Playblast vids, i rendered the animation and it took me more then one day to finish.

That was my first experience with Blendshapes and Animations and i'm happy with the result. There's still a lot to learn and improve.

And this is the completition of my Paul's project and it means so much to me. It was very difficult and challenging also because I wouldn't want to be disrespectful towards her figure in any way and I was afraid that the animation might turn out badly and odd. 

It's been a long way...and after all the work i am very happy for this project. Rest In Peace Legend.

Tom Holland Digi Double Likeness.

Tom Holland is my very first likeness project and i was so happy about the final look!

BREAKDOWN:

I started this project taking some references from internet and creating a PureRef dashboard.
In Zbrush, i used a head bashemesh from my personal library and sculpted on it to get the main shapes of Tom Holland. However, a very big and common mistake young artists like me make is to jump fastly on secondary, tertiary details. This can totally destroy the project and, of course, i DID this mistake hahah! I was so excited about my first likeness that i went too fast and my face shapes were totally off. So i started a new sculpt and this time i went very slow to get the anatomy and face shapes on point . There's still a lot to improve, digi doubles portraits are extremely difficult in my opinion because the anatomy has to be as perfect as possible to have a realistic look.
After the sculpt and primary shapes were completed, i started with some details going from big to very small. For that i have to make a special shoutout to J Hill and thank him for all his youtube tutorials. I followed his steps and guidelines and also purchased his fantastic Skin and Pores bundle from ArtStation.
I was very happy with my hand-made detailed skin so i jumped on Substance Painter to create the face base color, and guess, i followed again a J Hill tutorial about skin color creation! Of course first times my skin looked really odd and i had to restart a couple of times, but hey, that's part of the game!
About eyes, i used metahuman preset because they are fantastic in my opinion.

When i was happy about my textures, i jumped on Maya and create a first quick scene set-up for rendering with arnold with just a HDRI Skydome light.  This was my first time doing an Arnold render of a realistic likeness model so i needed a lot of help with hypershade and material set-up. And what was the best choice? Of course J Hill Anorld render tutorial! I watched his videos plenty of time because i wanted to LEARN and not only copy paste settings and materials.
Everything was on point and setup, even if i had to tweak skin shaders, base color and rough/spec map. SO firstly i decided to make hairs and of course i used xGen Maya, for me the best grooming feature for renders like that. Again in this part of the process, i did so many tries.Create,delete,create again, until i was happy with my hairs.

At the end i did some tweaks on skin shader, as i said before, and various skin maps. I created another light setup to get a film look to my final renders and finally i finished this project!

I learned a lot on likeness, frrom sculpt and anatomy, to material shaders and rendering.
Thanks again to J Hill for his contribution to the community and fantastic, usefull youtube tutorials.

Female Soldier - Game ready character

And this is a bonus of my application, a game-ready female character i made for a videogame project collaboration.
The main reference for this female soldier was an anime-like female with white hairs. The art director asked me to do her in a realistic style but with an anime feeling on the face/head. Yeah it was a tricky request and i tried my best and he really loved the final result.

BREAKDOWN

SO, i started with a basemesh already done in the past. I prefer using basemeshes for projects like this because it is better for the workflow and i can have the desired topology from start instaed of doing the whole body from scratch and lose a lot of times. I start from scratch only when i do private anatomy studies.
After i tweaked the body and got the main shapes, i decided to jump directly on Marvelous Designer for the military outfit. At the start it was difficult because i didn't have so much experience with this software and little by little I got the hang of it and I really liked the result.
I exported everything and jumped on ZBrush, in which i tried various Zremesher to have a better topology to sculpt on and after detailing the highpoly. Although the main clothes were not optimized from Zremesher so i had to jump on Maya to retopology by hand and then, when i've got every piece retopologized and optimized, i started unwrapping uv's, paying particular attention to textel density. This feature is so important in game-ready assets/character creation for the next step: texturing process.
I already knew i had to handle with seamless textures such as military patter for most clothes, so my uv sets were optimized and aligned for that.
In the texturing process, i jumped on Substance Painter and i tried various times baking the high poly and low poly to get the best resul i could. Then i started texturing, i love this part of the character workflow! Although i know i need to increase my texture skills of different materials. Very important in this process are the maps! It's a PBR process so maps like Roughness and Spec make the difference!
While doing textures, i create a set-up on marmoset Toolbag and jumped in an out to check my textures in real-time! I love that workflow because Marmoset makes very easy to jump from Substance Painter and render.

At the end, after i polished my textures, i went again on ZBrush to make a quick pose with Transpose Master for a better presentation ( i didn't need this time to create an entire rigg for this character and it was time consuming just for a pose presentation ).

And this is how i made this real-time character. This was done a few months ago in 2023 and it really helped me to improve on characters and now i'm doing better.

We did it! We have reached the end!
Big thanks and thumbs up for this fantastic contest and for every people organizing it, Andrew, Alwyn and everyone else! Thank you for your help to the community and to this industry!

Also thanks to all the judges reviewing our entries! There are so many fantastic artists and professionals out there!

Good luck to everyone and, as we say in Italy, "May the best win!"