Creating Cowgirl Portrait Based on AI Concept Using UE5 & Substance 3D

Introduction

Hi everyone! My name is Norbert Fuchs (I'm Hungarian despite my German name). I started 3D back in the late 90s: 3D Studio 4.0 for DOS... look it up! My skills came from completing personal projects. Trying to achieve an envisioned result and making, recognizing, and correcting thousands of mistakes along the way. This is called "practice."

Inspiration & References

With this project, I wanted to get near AI-generated quality. AI stole from us artists, now it's payback time! So I used an AI-generated image I've found on Pinterest as a reference, which I won't show, as it still looks 5 times better... find it yourself.

Modeling

I started in UE5 Metahuman Creator to save time on shaping the initial face and posing. It's nice to see it already shaded with proper eyes right from the start. Using this base, I applied an Advanced Skeleton rig to it and animated it into a pose. Then I exported the animated mesh as Alembic and went into Style 3D Atelier, importing the character as an avatar, and went with the patterns.

I wasn't looking for precision; I wanted a "looks good" result. Experimenting with the patterns, trying out all the fabric presets, then simulating with an animated character in pose, checking which kind of fold details it gives, changing, testing after it was posed, until I arrived at something that makes me happy.

The belt was created in Style3D Atelier. No particular pattern to follow, only checking my 3D view and adjusting as needed.

I've modeled the gun years ago (subdiv modeling), now I gave it a texture update in Substance 3D Painter.

I sculpted hands in ZBrush using the MetaHuman hands, using an overall pose, then detailed it a bit, mainly from the view of the camera, with no scan level realism, to make it feel like skin. These were imported as high-res meshes, and the original MetaHuman body was hidden.

Hair was created using XGen (which needs a serious update, in my opinion). Starting from a basic shape of the overall hair by identifying and breaking it into areas/layers, like the main shape, front kink, right wave, flyaways layer, etc., then converting those into interactive grooms and sculpting it by hand, often down to the individual hair strands to achieve a "wind-blown" look.

Retopology & Unwrapping

Right from the start, the distance from the camera was established. I knew she wouldn't move, so I did not care about the topology, so the clothing is vanilla high-res meshes exported from Style3D Atelier (quad mesh), not even subdiv was added to it in render.

Since MetaHumans are already UVd, I didn't have to spend time on that, except scaling and reorganizing the hand UV islands to get a decent resolution, and the UV for the clothing is the cloth patterns arranged in Style3D Atelier's UV editor (which could be improved by the way, I have some ideas...).

Texturing

My favourite part, texturing, was done in Substance 3D Painter. Usually, I like to do my textures from scratch, without using any scans, but now, to save time, I used the MetaHuman base color and Normal Map for her face. I did some color changes/updates, created a roughness using the normal details, constantly checking in render with the lighting already established.

This wasn't a proper LookDev process; I needed it to work with this specific lighting from this distance.

I've painted her hands from scratch using the nail smart material for her nails. When I work on a personal project, I don't care about planning before, as I'll be the only one using the files, so I go with the flow and organize layers later if I need to. But when working for a studio, it is imperative to plan ahead right from the start so others will be able to pick it up easily if needed.

The dress had to look used, so after adding a default fabric material, fine-tuning the scale, I created additional memory fold bumps to make the fabric look used.

As for the belt, I created a leather smart material from scratch and added some hand-painted details, mostly through masks. The sewing details were added using the pen tool in Substance 3D Painter, which was very handy.

Lighting

Lighting is the most important aspect. It defines the mood and makes your models come alive or die instantly... In this case, it is an Arnold skyDomelight in Maya, which uses a directional light as the sun, and you can tweak other options like atmosphere turbidity, color, azimuth, etc, and a few other lights to simulate bounce light from the ground and bring out shapes, specular highlights here and there.

Every scenario is different, so you need to know what you are trying to achieve (if you are "copying" a reference, then it is much easier, so use references!) I knew that post work would make it pop, so we don't have to get a 100% raw render. In post-production, I created some bloom and film grain, and also applied color correction to make the shadows less dark.

Conclusion

The most challenging part of this project was the dress. I still could not achieve all I wanted because cloth creation for a still image in Style3D Atelier or Marvelous Designer is not so art-directable at the moment as I need it to be. Atelier is better, in my opinion, due to its faster and more stable simulation compared to MD.

My advice to beginners: do personal projects that make you sweat. You'll encounter and solve lots of problems, thus gaining experience, and that is how "talented" is made.

Thanks for reading. I hope you've learned something about the overall process. Now get back to work!

Norbert Fuchs, Texturing & LookDev Artist