Jean-Michel Basquiat Recreated in 3D With Unreal Engine 5

Senior Character Artist Jonathan Phillips has recently paid tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat, a renowned Graffiti and Neo-expressionism Artist, by recreating the artist in a digital space. According to the author, this outstanding portrait of Jean-Michel was modeled and sculpted with Maya and ZBrush, textured using Substance 3D Painter and TexturingXYZ's materials, and rendered in Unreal Engine 5, with XGen having been used to recreate the artist's recognizable hairstyle. Jonathan also noted that this project was set up without using the MetaHuman toolset.

The creator also shared a couple of WiP shots, demonstrating the character sculpt in ZBrush and hair guides in XGen:

And here are some of Jonathan's earlier works:

If you would like to learn more about rendering 3D characters in Unreal Engine 5, we also recommend checking out this hour-long tutorial by Character Artist J Hill, which demonstrates the processes of importing custom character models, creating materials, and rendering high-quality images in the engine:

We highly encourage you to visit Jonathan's ArtStation and Instagram pages to check out more of the artist's awesome works. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Threads, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.