Making Of 'Abraham Lincoln'

Introduction

I am a big fan of caricatures and ever since I joined the CG community I've wanted to create one in 3D. I wanted to create a model with a recognizable face and lot of wrinkles. I also wanted to use V-Ray's SSS2 shader and spice it up with an interesting hairstyle. Abraham Lincoln was just perfect for this.

Reference

For the reference I used a beautifully hand-drawn image by Roberto Freire and I want to thank him for letting me use it.

Modeling

Since I have modeled a few heads before I decided to use one of those as the starting point. To allow me to practice my modeling I chose a model that was the total opposite of Abraham Lincoln (Fig.01).

Fig.01

Fig.01

I use ZBrush for modeling and my pipeline is pretty simple. In most cases I use the Standard, Clay and Move brushes with a little help from the Smooth brush, of course. For this image I downloaded alphas for the skin from the internet and tweaked them a little bit so they were easier to use in ZBrush (Fig.02).

Fig.02

Fig.02

There's no secret when it comes to the modeling stage; everything is about perception and chasing forms until you are happy with the result. You should try to keep the topology good from the beginning or at some stage do some retopology. This is important because you may later wish to animate your character.

The eye model consisted of four parts; the iris, sclera, cornea and the plane behind the iris representing the pupil. This was just to stop the light from getting into the eye (Fig.03).

Fig.03

Fig.03

Hair Modeling

For the hair I used the Hair and Fur system inside 3ds Max. This part of image was fun but also very hard to do because the hair consisted of 12 layers, and it took me almost two weeks to get it all done. The shaping of the hair and beard was the hardest part to carry out because of all those curly shapes. The rest of the layers represent the clusters above and behind the ear and the additional hairs like those on the suit (Fig.04a - b).

Fig.04

Fig.04


Since I used a high resolution head model for the render I needed to export the lowest subdivision level model from ZBrush and cut out only necessary polygons for my scalp model. I used the spline modeling method as I think this is the best way of modeling when it comes to hair. The placeholder hair that I made in ZBrush helped me a lot because I projected guide splines onto it with the help of the Snap to Surface tool, which is under the Freeform tab in the Graphite modeling tools (Fig.05a - 5c).

Fig.05a

Fig.05a

Fig.05b

Fig.05b

Fig.05c

Fig.05c

After snapping the splines to the surface they needed to be simplified by deleting the unnecessary vertexes and tweaking the rest to get the desired form. When I was satisfied with the form I just played a little with the kink, frizz and multi-strand parameters, which make hair look much more realistic. As for the hair shader I only used a texture for the density and tweaked the default settings.

Texturing

For some time now I have been using headus UV layout when unwrapping my objects. It's an unbelievably smart and quick program, and also very easy to use. I used Zapplink for the texturing and had very good reference images that I took in the studio that I'm currently working in. It is very important to use good reference images with no baked specular because it really helps to improve the final result (Fig.06a - c).

Fig.06a

Fig.06a

Fig.06b

Fig.06b

Fig. 06c

Fig. 06c

An important part of the texture is the cavity map. Whenever I make models with wrinkles or scales I switch my model to the highest subdivision level in ZBrush and go into the Masking tab in the Tool menu.

Then I select the Mask by Cavity option and after that, under the Texture Map tab, I select the new texture from the mask option. This way I get a new texture with a completely black fill in cavities. Later I put that texture above my color texture in Photoshop and set it to Overlay Blending mode with the opacity set to 15%. Because I was working with high res models I exported the displacement maps in the last subdivision level in ZBrush.

Shading

For the skin shader I used the V-Ray SSS2 shader, which is very powerful and means you can get very realistic results in a short period of time. The setup is very simple so I used textures for the overall color and the specular.

The texture for the specular is just solid color with a slightly lighter color on the mouth and under the eyes. For the sub surface color I used a light red-orange color and for the scatter color I used dark red-browns (Fig.07).

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

For the eyes I used almost the same shader, but I increased the scatter radius. On the sclera I assigned a Blend material, which is a mix of the two materials, one SSS2 and the other Standard material, with the opacity set to 0%.

In the Mask slot is a Gradient Ramp map with Gradient type set to Radial. On the pupil plane I put a solid black material (Fig.08).

Fig.08

Fig.08

Lighting

For the lightning I used a common light setup with four lights: key, fill and two back lights to emphasize contours and create back scatter on the character (Fig.09).

Fig.09

Fig.09

Render Setup

The render setup was very simple and the only thing I changed from the default settings is the V-Ray Color mapping type, which was set to Exponential with the Dark and Bright multiplier set to 1.25. Although this was a small change,
it drastically improved the final render.

Compositing

Because I was happy with the render I had very little to do when it came to putting it all together. The biggest task was to find the right background and linking it to the character. At the end I added some Sharpen and made some color curve adjustments (Fig.10).

Fig.10

Fig.10

I hope that this Making Of helped you and answered some questions.

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