Breakdown: Creating a Man with Amazing Grooming

Introduction

Hi everyone! I've had very little change since my last breakdown. I've also been working as a freelancer on various animation and advertising projects. Over the last year, as I've started to explore Houdini's grooming capabilities intensely, I've been getting a lot of fur projects where Houdini is incredibly handy, and you can create really different types of fur and hair.

About the Man with a Beard Project

So, let's talk about my recent personal project, "Man with a Beard." A few months ago, I came across an incredible concept by the very talented artist Heewon Kim. I was inspired by the character's image and decided I wanted to create something similar. I'm not a character artist, and creating the whole character, with clothes complete and all the details, would take me too much time. So, I decided that I wanted to create just the head of the character, where I could work on sculpting, textures, materials, and hair, as well as make a nice render.

My reference set was like this: basic concept, some photos with people in similar poses and with similar light so I could understand how the light works on skin and hair, and some images with similar hairstyles so I could see the hair structure.

I set myself the goal of doing this project in 2 days, as I didn't want to spend too much free time. Since I wasn't going to model the clothes, it was feasible, given that I would use the basic head mesh and ready-made textures from XYZ, which only needed some minor manual tweaking.

Work Process

So, the first thing I did was head over to ZBrush to create the head sculpt I wanted.

 First, I did a basic sculpt to get the general shape:

And then, I gradually added subdivisions so I could work out the details:

I didn't add fine pores or details in ZBrush, as I decided to use the VFace textures from XYZ Texturing directly in Maya, specifically to add displacement in the Arnold material.

Grooming

I used Houdini to create the groom.

When creating the main hair, I first created guides on the right side and then on the left side, and next, combined all of them into a single object. I usually find it easier to work this way when a hairstyle has several sections with different hair growth directions.

Since I was going to render the frame, I decided not to pay too much attention to the back of the head, where the hair would not be visible. So, I made the guides there conditionally to fill in at least somehow in the area of hair growth.

I also like to add baby hairs to make the transition from skin to hair neater and smoother. I usually make this hair a little thinner than the main hair. For a more natural look, don't make them too thick.

When creating the beard, I separated all the hair into two parts — main and gray — using Guide Mask and Blast Node (I also did it separately when exporting the hair to Maya for rendering). That way, it was easier for me to see what the character's hair looked like in the viewport. In fact, I added gray hair as a separate object and also added some percentage of gray hair in the main hair shader. But I'll talk about that later.

I did the eyebrows the same way:

Texturing

I used Substance 3D Painter to create some texture maps. Arnold's shader uses Coat, so I created a mask for that. I also got the Cavity Map in ZBrush, removed the extra elements, and then added that map in the shader to the Albedo Map from XYZ. In the end, I drew a mask for the gray hair, which I used in the shader for the hair and beard. For all other texture maps, like Albedo and Roughness, I used ready-made ones from the XYZ aset.

Clothes

I bought a ready-made jacket asset, as I didn't want to spend time creating it (especially since I'm not an expert in clothing modeling, and it would have taken me a lot of time). Since the jacket is practically invisible in the composition, I didn't waste time on retopology, and the UV was already ready in Marvelous Designer; it saved me a lot of time. The only thing I did was create a model of the T-shirt inside Maya, which was simple enough, and it didn't take long.

Shading

I used Arnold in Maya for the renderer, as it's easy enough to work with to get a good result. Plus, on the XYZ Texturing website, there is an add-on that will help you fine-tune your shader (I used the Advanced DSP shader for displacement and the Advanced SPC shader for specular and roughness).

I exported the Displacement Map from ZBrush with the following parameters:

To control the color in Diffuse, I used the aiColorCorrect node, where I slightly changed the gamma and saturation values. To control the coat values, I used the Texture Map created in Substance 3D Painter and the aiRange node.

I used several materials for different parts of the hair, such as head hair, beard, gray hair, and facial fuzz. I added the gray hair mask to the melanin in the shader on the head hair and beard, where the light areas were dark hair, and the black areas were hairs without melanin, that is white or gray.

Lighting and Rendering

I used two rectangular light sources to emphasize details on the face and a fill HDRI with a minimum intensity value to avoid black shadows.

I chose CPU for rendering because GPU does not work correctly with melanin in hair and does not make hair gray or white; it adds yellowness. In general, the picture turns out to be less noisy.

Conclusion

I'm happy with the final result I made over a couple of free weekends. I practiced a bit of sculpting, grooming, and shading. I think I got a similar look for the character I wanted to get. Since most of my work projects are all about grooming, it was a pleasure to take on the task of creating a portrait like this. If you still have questions, feel free to post them in the comments or message me on social media. Thank you!

Artem Erikenov, Grooming Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine