Recreating Oil Painting Barking Up the Wrong Turkey in 3D with ZBrush & UE5

Introduction

Hi, I’m Quentin Moulinneuf. I’ve been working in the industry for around two years now. Some people might remember my previous 80 Level interview about my Mads Mikkelsen likeness study inspired by the Hannibal series. Since then, I’ve spent almost a year working at Unit Image, taken on freelance work, and lately I’ve also been focusing on building my own collectible brand.

Inspiration

I’ve always loved studying old masters because I think it’s one of the best ways to understand how artists interpreted reality and pushed emotion through their work. Leyendecker has been a huge inspiration to me ever since I started taking art seriously. He and Norman Rockwell always stood out to me because of how alive and expressive their work feels. I wanted to pay tribute to that through a 3D study.

At first, I hesitated between a few different paintings, but Barking Up the Wrong Turkey immediately felt like the most interesting challenge. The composition, the shapes, the storytelling everything about it felt fun to tackle in 3D, even though I knew it would be difficult.

Modeling, Painting, & Rendering

For this project, I worked mainly in ZBrush. It was honestly a rather spontaneous and “quick and dirty” project made mostly for fun, so I didn’t really approach it like a fully production-ready asset. Since I already spend my days doing industry work, this was more about enjoying the process and experimenting freely. Everything was polypainted directly in ZBrush.

For the painting process, I mostly used ClayBuildup with low opacity to softly blend colors together. One technique that really helped me was taking screenshots of the ZBrush viewport, painting over them in Photoshop almost like a 2D illustration, and then projecting those paintovers back onto the model in ZBrush using stencil projection. A big part of the final look came from going back and forth between Photoshop and ZBrush like this.

For rendering, I kept things extremely simple. I plugged the vertex colors directly into Unreal Engine and worked with a fully unlit viewport to preserve the painterly look and stay as close as possible to the original painting.

Conclusion

The whole project probably took me around a week, maybe close to 40 hours total. My favorite part was definitely the painting stage. I love treating 3D models almost like a canvas instead of obsessing over tiny sculpted details everywhere. For me, the real magic happens when the painting starts bringing personality and life into the piece.

I didn’t follow any tutorials for this project, but I learned a lot while doing it, especially about improving the transition between Photoshop and ZBrush for texturing and paint projection workflows.