The Process of Recreating Jean-Michel Basquiat in ZBrush & UE5

Introduction

Hey, my name is Jonathan Phillips; I’m a Senior Character artist working in the games industry. Originally I’m from Scotland but currently reside in Toronto, Canada. 

My journey into the games industry was fairly standard I would imagine, after graduating in 2013 from the University of the West of Scotland with a bachelor's degree in 3D Computer Animation with Digital Art, I found myself without a job and unprepared for how much work it would take to get my foot in the door. I managed to get an unpaid internship at a small games studio in Glasgow in October 2014, which then led to a full-time job by January 2015.

I bounced around a few small games studios in Scotland and Ireland before getting the call from Ubisoft Toronto in 2018. They moved my fiancée and me to Canada and we have been here ever since. I have been lucky to have worked on some amazing titles such as Far Cry 6, The Division 2 DLC content, and a little on The Splinter Cell remake before I took the leap and joined The Madden Team at EA Sports.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

When sculpting, I am trying to get into the mindset of sculpting people who are not exactly in the public spotlight, I usually go through artstation before starting any head sculpt and see what has been done before. I found that no one had ever attempted Basquiat before and the more I spoke about him to colleagues or friends, the more I realised that, not many people know who Jean-Michel Basquiat is. All people really knew about him was the iconic hairstyle. I also wanted the challenge of creating this hairstyle, I knew that if it was something I could pull off, it would stand out. For over a year now I have been a supervisor/mentor at Think Tank on their Advanced Character Creation course. At the start of each term, I like to start a head sculpt, mainly I do this to show the students how I go about finding a likeness and finishing a project, and for this opportunity, I chose to sculpt Basquiat.

Before I begin my concept, I always make sure I have enough reference images of the person. I do this to have as many angles of the subject as possible to better understand every form on the face. I like to go through Google Images, Getty Images, and Instagram as this helps me get lots of references from different angles and perspectives. It’s important to remember each reference photo will be taken from a different angle, a different lens, and in different lighting. You’ll notice when you go through your sculpt and are using these reference images that things like the face perspective will be affected, for example, they could have a very wide face (orthographic) or their face could be narrow and forward facing (fisheye lens). It’s up to you as the artist to understand this difference and learn how this will affect your 3D sculpt. Another thing to remember is that the position of the subject's head could be different in each picture, this is important to remember when you line up the front and side paint-overs.    

The image I used for my main front reference is circled in red, I always make sure to have a good front and side image before I start sculpting, and the rest are a bonus. Don’t be afraid to get images from other artists whose work inspires you. I have seen and been around artists who instead of celebrating people's work, put them down or nitpick at little things. Instead, we should be celebrating what people in our industry can achieve, because the way I see it, is if they can do it, so I can we. It really helps me appreciate others' art and makes me want to become a better artist. I always have a goal in mind or a standard I want to hit for each project, and for this one, I was trying to get close to the amazing work of Şefki Ibrahim. The work he produces always blows my mind and is something I always strive to match. 

Modeling

So usually when I sculpt, I start from a base mesh, sadly I don’t have the time to always start from a sphere. The last project I started from a sphere was Conor McGregor's likeness, but this one I started with the amazing base mesh from Texturing XYZ. I knew from the beginning I was going to utilise the new VFace texture pack (VFace #79 Adam, to be exact). I always start my sculpt by eyeballing the head for the first hour or so or until I feel like I am getting closer to the desired likeness. I then take a screenshot of the head, front, and side and do some paint-overs in Photoshop. 

This is the part of the process that I think is the most important, if you want to achieve a good likeness, you have to be constantly lining the head up with the reference and making sure you are going in the right direction. I always use layers when sculpting in ZBrush; you never know when you might want to remove something or tone something down.

The head sculpt was relatively straightforward. As I said I tend to eyeball for the first hour and then after my paint-over, delve deeper into the plane changes and finding the structure of the face. I have a weird way of sculpting if I’m honest. I sculpt heads for a living in the games industry and with that, you have tight deadlines, so everything has to be done in a tight schedule. With my personal work, I like to take my time. I usually sculpt the head within a month and then set it aside for sometimes upwards of 6 months. I don’t really care about finishing projects if I’m honest, I just like sculpting and trying to achieve a good likeness, so putting work aside for a while will let your eyes refresh and when you open it again you might see what’s wrong. Or in rare occasions, nothing wrong, and then you are ready to move on. 

As I mentioned earlier, I used VFace for the displacement and textures, these were applied in ZBrush by breaking up the maps into the RGB channels and applying them using layers. On top of that, I added extra layers to break up the skin details, such as spots and moles. The normal map is then controlled further inside Unreal Engine 5 with the different ID mask channels for further refinement. 

For the clothing, I knew they wouldn’t be the central focus of this project, so instead of spending time in Marvelous Designer making a suit jacket, shirt, and tie, I just modelled the outfit in ZBrush from DynaMesh. I have a base body I used to mask out the items of clothing and used polygroups/ZRemesher to get a good base to start sculpting. I then retopologized the mesh in Maya using Quad Draw and textured it in Substance 3D Painter.

Texturing

I always use Substance 3D Painter for texturing the character – it’s what we also use in the game industry. I love the control you get in the application, and the results speak for itself. For the skin, I used the skin albedo map from the VFace pack that I bought and adjusted it to match Jean-Michel a little better. The only thing I utilized from the MetaHuman pipeline was the eyes, UE5 encourages people to use the eyes they created and I fully agree. In the earlier versions of my character in UE5, I was using FlippedNormals eyes, which are awesome, but when UE5 gives you the shader already set up, why wouldn’t you use them?

Hair

The hair was probably the most challenging part of this project. As I mentioned earlier, before I even began this project, I wanted to create Basquiat’s iconic hairstyle. I’d never worked with his hair texture and style before, and there are little to no references online to help you, so I had no idea how I was going to achieve this! The first thing I looked into was how his hair actually sits. I came across Troyblyden on Instagram who was documenting his Basquiat-inspired hairstyle. With this, I was able to see how the hair actually sits and what it should be doing, instead of me guessing at every turn. I had a few different attempts at it before managing to get what you see in the final image. It might not be 100% accurate, but I was quite happy with the final look. I used XGen for the hair and started with creating a small afro base. I then placed different guides to act as the main clumps of dreads and used different modifiers to control and achieve the desired look. 

The bulk of the hair is controlled by 3 clumping modifiers, 1 cut, 3 coils, and 3 noises. It may be a bit excessive, but hear me out! I used the first clumping modifier to clump the main guides together, to get a good starting point. The second clumping had a steep drop off in the clump scale at around the 70% mark, this was to achieve the fanned-out look to the bigger clumps. The third clumping was similar to the last, but this one the drop off was at around 90% to have a smaller fan of the hair. The rest is pretty self-explanatory, cut to trim down the shape, coil to make the curl, and noise to puff the look.

Rendering

For the rendering, I took the time to learn Unreal Engine for this project. Having worked in the games industry for upwards of 8 years, I have never actually used Unreal to make games, so this was my first venture into the software. I originally was going to use MetaHuman as my base mesh and materials etc., but wasn’t as impressed with this compared to Arnold skin shaders. My goal is always to match what Arnold can produce, and this will continue to be my goal until I can achieve that. I used a material I built in Arnold as a base for my shader in Unreal and then found a great tutorial on using XYZ maps in Unreal by Nick Rutlinh. This tutorial was invaluable, as he takes you through every part of the process when creating a material. I also used his hair material tutorial which also worked wonders… and for $5 each? It’s a bargain! I added a few extra inputs into the skin shader after the tutorial finished and will continue to do this for future projects until I am able to get that "Arnold look".

Lighting has always been my Achilles' heel. I love sculpting, but the worst part for me is the final push with lighting and look dev, which is where I always fall short. For the lighting in this project, I tried all different types, 3-point light setup, HDRI, softboxes, spot lights, but nothing looked good to me. In the end, I used one simple point light and then for the look dev renders I used one rect light with a softbox image in the colour slot. For me, I believe less is more with lighting. I was once told by a colleague that if your sculpt is good enough, you won’t need lots of fancy lighting to show it off. 

I think it is very difficult to achieve a fully realistic character; I’m still trying to get there myself! It’s a slow and steady process and one which you have to continue to work on no matter how long you’ve been in this industry. Sometimes you can get so stuck in making your sculpt realistic that it stops becoming fun. It’s important to know when to stop and learn from your sculpt, and then implement that into your next project. I learnt a lot with this project most notably Unreal Engine, it’s definitely something I will be using in the future to push my likenesses further.

Conclusion

For this project, I didn't think I could put time into it, I started it last July and worked on it very sporadically, between teaching, my full-time job, doing other artworks, and living my life in general. The head, I know, took me 3 weeks to finish; the rest is up in the air. I think if I wasn’t trying to learn software in between creating this project, it would have gone a lot faster. I did however become very proficient in UE5 and a lot more confident with XGen during this project, so I see it as time well spent.

The main challenge is always within yourself, the biggest battle we face as artists has to be self-confidence, knowing that whatever we make is never good enough, but having the strength to let something go is good for us and good for younger artists to learn. Not everything we make will light up the world, but if we can produce better results every time we sculpt, then that is where we succeed. You shouldn’t compare yourself to other artists – compare yourself to yesterday's you. It’s the only way to progress.

Advice I would give to younger artists is kind of what I said above, the biggest battle we face is ourselves and that starts straight away in this industry. I got into teaching to help students get better in this area; even though it’s something I struggle with myself. But younger artists, especially ones trying to break into the industry, need to learn patience and determination. You will hear many nos before you hear a yes, but you have to learn to take the nos as motivation to improve and not give up. As I tell my students each year, if a wee guy from Glasgow can make it to EA Sports, then anyone can do this job with the right attitude and a strong mentality. Keep pushing and striving to get better each day and you will make it. 

Jonathan Phillips, Senior Character Artist

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie