Crafting Photorealistic Brushes In V-Ray & XGen

Introduction

Hi everyone! My name is Jillian Ubando, and I'm a CG Artist from Los Angeles, California. Previously, I worked at EDGLRD and Elastic as a CG Lead/Generalist across both pre-rendered and real-time workflows.

After earning a neuroscience degree from UCLA, I transitioned into visual effects and quickly found a passion for storytelling through CG. I now work across film and commercials, specializing in photorealistic lighting, look development, and digital sets, with clients such as James Cameron, The Weeknd, Kim Kardashian, Nike, Travis Scott, and Marc Jacobs. I love creating real-time cinematics in Unreal Engine for global campaigns and original IP. My goal is to keep pursuing projects that blend narrative, mood, and technical craft across both real-time and pre-rendered pipelines.

Project Goal

This project began as a personal lookdev and shading study, with a bonus deep dive into grooming. I'm not a groom artist by trade, but I wanted to challenge myself to create 27 custom XGen descriptions across different brushes, and to build layered groom materials that could support the realism I was aiming for.

The focus was on telling a quiet story through surface detail, softness, and the kind of wear that tools collect over time. This piece is the first in an ongoing personal series exploring color, craft, and aging materials.

Reference & Inspiration

My main reference came from a still I found on Pinterest, originally from Jackson's Art. I was drawn to the subtle wear, color variation, and texture in the bristles, it felt like the perfect challenge for a photorealistic grooming and shading study. From there, I gathered additional references for lighting, mood, and specific model details like brush handle proportions and the wooden box they'd live in.

Modeling & Texturing

I modeled several brushes in Maya, working to real-world scale. To get enough detail for close-up renders without creating an overwhelming number of texture sets, I grouped the brushes into UV sets of 3-4 each.

In Substance 3D Painter, I started with basic smart materials for the wood grain and metal, quickly building on top of them, layering procedural dirt, roughness breakup, and custom edge wear. I eventually created my own base smart material from this setup, which I reused across brushes before masking in custom paint residue for each brush. Everything was kept organized by layer and folder, so I could texture iteratively, adjusting color as I refined the groom shading.

Grooming & Guide Work

The bristles were key to selling the realism, so I spent a lot of time hand-placing and shaping XGen guides to match my references. In some areas, I added outer grooms to break up the silhouette and introduce stray hairs for natural breakup. I relied heavily on clumping, noise, and cut modifiers to create a range of states, from new to slightly used, to worn.

In total, the scene required 27 separate grooms to capture the range of bristle shapes and states.

Lookdev & Shading

Because color blending along the strand was so important, I started lookdev early. I used a V-Ray Sampler Info node to drive a ramp along the strand V-coordinate, controlling the color transition from base to tip. Initially, the gradient felt too even, so I added noise to the ramp input for more variation.

To add realism, I also included paint clumps, groom geometry shaded using V-Ray Distance Tex to blend naturally into the bristles. This helped sell the idea of dried, built-up paint between the strands.

Camera Animation

Though this was a still-life piece, I wanted to give it movement. I animated a simple camera move to create a cinematic, macro-photography feel, then added subtle camera shake with a noise expression to evoke the feeling of handheld footage. This added a little extra life to the final video.

Lighting

Lighting was approached in stages. I began by assigning a blinn shader to the brush handles so I could focus on light direction and shaping. Once that felt balanced, I added textures and grooms and refined the setup further.

I used a classic three-point lighting rig: a warm key, a rim, and a neutral HDRI fill from Poly Haven. Later, I introduced a soft background light to push values in the environment and guide the eye. Throughout the process, I constantly desaturated the render in the V-Ray Frame Buffer to check black-and-white values and ensure the composition read clearly without color.

Render Settings & Optimization

Rendering 27 grooms at full resolution quickly became expensive, especially since I always intended this as a video, not just a still. My early test renders were taking several hours per frame, so I focused heavily on optimizing render settings.

For the still image, I rendered at fairly standard quality. But for the video, I leaned on the V-Ray denoiser pass as the final beauty and adjusted my settings to favor speed:

• GI Light Cache Subdivs: 500
• AA Max Subdivs: 8
• Noise Threshold: 0.15

The resulting beauty pass was noisy, but the denoiser cleaned it up surprisingly well and saved a massive amount of render time.

Compositing & Color Grading

One brush had some flickering reflections in animation, which I isolated using Cryptomatte in Nuke. A friend and I tried several deflicker methods, getting it about 60% improved in Nuke, and then passed it through DaVinci Resolve's deflicker tool, which gave better results.

Final compositing and color grading were done in After Effects. I explored filter references in VSCO, and once I found a mood I liked, I used that as a guide for my final grade, balancing warmth, texture, and contrast to tie everything together.

Final Thoughts

This piece challenged me to balance craft and control, especially in areas I don't often get to focus on, like grooming. It also gave me the opportunity to iterate on lighting, delve into complex hair shaders, and manage render optimization.

More than anything, this project reminded me how much story and personality can be conveyed through surface wear, color breakup, and the tiniest hints of use. It was a personal technical challenge, but also a chance to slow down, observe, and craft something tactile and calm. I'm excited to continue exploring grounded, craft-based studies like this, and I hope this breakdown was helpful to anyone looking to get deeper into grooming, shading, or scene lighting in V-Ray.

Jillian Ubando, CG Artist