Sculpting Two Expressive Stylized Female Portraits

Introduction

Hello, my name is Daniil "Split" Voskressensky, and I'm a 3D Character Artist with about 5 years of experience. I'm currently working at Airborn Studios, creating characters and weapons for Overwatch 2. My journey into 3D started with a deep love for Blizzard games.

I took online courses focused on stylized character creation, then built my personal portfolio, which eventually led to my first professional role. Since then, I've had the opportunity to contribute to projects like Fortnite, Overwatch 2, and several others still under NDA. It brings me immense joy to create stylized characters and constantly set new challenges for myself.

Portrait Studio

The work on these two portraits started quite spontaneously. I came across some strong concepts by Wu Shenyou and Shuai Jiang and decided to sculpt these characters live during my regular streams. Since I hadn't had much hands-on practice sculpting female faces throughout my career, I saw this as a good opportunity to improve that aspect of my skill set and push my portraits toward being more expressive and visually appealing.

My main goal was to stay as close to the original concepts as possible while still introducing a bit of my own artistic style, without letting it conflict with the source material. For the presentation, I also wanted to experiment with a few rendering techniques, which I'll talk about a bit later. That said, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking there, just a set of small touches that helped support the final look.

Workflow

My process always starts with a careful analysis of the concept. I focus on facial proportions, key features, negative spaces, overall volumes, and the mood of the character. From there, I begin blocking out a basic head sculpt. I always sculpt heads from scratch, and I deliberately try to do this faster each time, because the more heads you sculpt, the more efficient the process naturally becomes over time.

I constantly review the sculpt from multiple angles to catch even the smallest inconsistencies. In this case, most of the available references were front-facing, so I relied heavily on those, while still making a conscious effort to check the profile. Three-quarter views are especially important: a model can look great from the front, but if it falls apart from the sides, the final result will always feel weaker. This part of the process is very straightforward and foundational.

Typically, I spend the first few hours creating a rough draft of the head, along with early blockouts of clothing elements and accessories. Then, on a different day, I return to the sculpt with a fresh eye and start refining it further, pushing it closer to the original concept.

As for clothing, I usually model everything either with ZModeler or in Maya. I prefer working this way because it allows me to maintain clean surfaces, which is essential when applying creases and using Dynamic Subdivisions later in the process.

Texturing

Since I am having a ZBrush-Marmoset Toolbag pipeline, I painted all textures inside the ZBrush with no UVs. The textures themselves are pretty simple on these projects. Just some Color Fills, gradients, and a bit more polypaint on the skin. I wanted to save the stylized, simple look of these portraits. And as long as it was mostly the sculpting practice projects, I did not spend a lot of time on the textures.

The main focus was the face, so I always want it to pop more. I always break the skin into the color zones: red, blue, and yellow. Blue zone is mostly on the lower part of the face, yellow is mainly for the central part of the face, and red is for the nose, eyes, ears, cheeks, and mouth. The colors can be very subtle, but their presence gives a bit more natural look to your portrait.

I am also using Mask by Normals to add some highlights and shadows to the BaseColor of your portrait. To make a highlight, do these steps:

1. Rotate the camera, looking from the top
2. Hit Mask by Normals
3. Hit the Boost mask a couple of times
4. Paint Unmasked areas with a lighter color

For making shadows, you do the same steps, but you have to rotate the camera looking from the bottom. Besides that, there was also light makeup.

Rendering

The render was made in Marmoset Toolbag 5, taking into account the character and vibe of the characters. For the girl in the blue shirt, I wanted something gentle and soft, while for the cowgirl, I wanted something more aggressive. These effects were achieved mainly through post-processing effects in Marmoset Toolbag.

For the cowgirl, I made the render sharper and the background more aggressive. For the girl in the blue shirt, I added a bloom effect and a softer render. The lighting is classic and simple. Top light, rim light, and HDRI itself.

The main magic here is done by material and shader settings. For example, Microfiber is used on the shirt, while Subsurface Scattering is used for the skin. In Marmoset Toolbag, you can achieve cool effects for different materials.

Conclusion

Since I only had one angle of the concept, I had to make it convincing and similar to the concept, but at the same time, I wanted the character to look good from other angles as well. It was great practice, I got to try out new rendering techniques and had a ton of fun.

I am very motivated at work when I see the progress of a character. I put what I did yesterday next to what has been updated today. This way, I can see the progress clearly and want to push the project forward even more.

Don't be afraid to experiment and develop your weak areas. Collect references and get inspired! If you enjoyed this short breakdown, feel free to check out more of my work on my social media: ArtStation, X/Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Daniil "Split" Voskressenski, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins