Miriam Sarbu discusses her experiments with photogrammetry. Free scans inside!
3D generalist Miriam Sarbu has presented her amazing experiments with photorealistic 3D photogrammetry scans, creative sculpting, and a bit of imagination. The artist shared her workflow behind her 3D concept art project Alienation.
The project is a mix of a Xenomorph Alien figurine and a full-body female scans. The overall process from start to finish took two days. Miriam discussed every major step: from scanning to dealing with textures.
Sculpting the texture of the skin and intricacies was probably the most time consuming part. I sculpted muscles, ligaments and veins over the entire female body. Again, easily done when the scan is of a high quality, you can practically see the muscles through the skin anyways. After this step I merged the Alien spine, ribs and tail into the female mesh. I used the same procedure as for the head to blend everything together. Afterwards I added an accessory, which was made using clay tubes and then preceded to add skin details. Sculpting the alphas, pores, imperfections, lesions and veins on different layers was a long process as you can expect.
Painting the map with poly paint layers in Zbrush is the easiest and most basic way to achieve a nice outcome. Next, playing about with the transparency levels on the different layers of textures really helped get just the right effect I was hoping for. Now – we bake it all in.
Baking maps
Baking a diffuse and normal map, then taking these into KeyShot to render a matte, gloss, ambient occlusion and a main pass was next. In Photoshop I composited these by layering them on top of each other and quickly tweaked the values to get everything how I liked.
My sculpt was never intended for rigging, so starting with a posed scan I didn’t want to concern myself too much with poly count or the topology. To put it simply, it was great to just go wild and be creative without the restrictions. I kept the overall poly count below 100k as I didn’t want to wait an eternity for the render passes in KeyShot.
Miriam Sarbu
Make sure to read the full breakdown here. Here comes the most awesome part. You can download the female and alien scans to try something yourself. Only until the end of March!