Hi, my name is Alan Camara and this is the making of my work, “Salvatore”. Salvatore is the one of characters from a movie called “The Name of the Rose”, played by Ron Perlman (the same actor from the Hell Boy movie). Starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater, this movie was one of the greats from the 1980s.
Research:
The great challenge to modelling a character like this is to reproduce a famous “likeness”. I did look on the Internet for photos and references of the movie, but because it is an old movie it wasn’t easy to find good pictures of Salvatore. However, luckily, I had in my head some memories that helped me to create the character in 3d.
Modelling:
I usually model using with poly-by-poly technique, but for this piece I used a base mesh from one of my female models, and in ZBrush I adjusted the shape. One of best features of ZBrush, which I personally think is amazing, is "retopoly". With this tool it is possible to add and create new geometries inside ZBrush. I also used this feature to make the Salvatore’s clothing.
The next step was to adjust the shape and the pose using another feature called "transpose". In the last step I added wrinkles, pores and veins ( Fig1 and 2).
Fig.01
Fig. 02
Textures:
Colour Map: For the textures I decided to do them all in ZBrush using the "Colorize" tool. To paint the skin it is necessary to use several layers to create all the veins, pores, blood capillaries, and all those other things that can achieve more realism in the final render ( Fig3).
Fig.03
To create the colour map I used the Map Color + Normal Map generated in ZBrush, and in Photoshop I combined the two maps using the blending mode. This way I got a colour map with soft shadow information. The process is to change the colour of the normal map to greyscale and adjust the Levels. Later, you can put the map as a layer over the colour map layer, change the blending mode to "Soft light", and adjust the opacity to 20% ( Fig. 4, 5, 6 and 7).
