Behind the Scenes: Autumn

I have been a freelance graphic designer since 2010. I consider myself more of a generalist in 3D. I touch everything. But I have mastered modeling better than animation.

For this project, I wanted to create a woman’s face to improve my proportion skills. And Gretel’s drawing motivated me right away. Every little detail counts. Moving vertices slightly to change the physiognomy! Moreover, I wanted to improve my skills on the face rig.

1. The Face

I wanted to reproduce the drawing of Gretel Lusky.

I modeled the face with mesh modeling to get the right topology.

And finally, with a lot of morphological retouching, I achieved a symmetrical model. Then I unwrapped the mesh.

2. The Leaves

I started with a lot of metaballs…

And at the end, I converted metaballs to mesh and sculpted in sculpt mode to get a good shape. I used Instant Meshes for retopology of the sculpt and then I unwrapped it.

At that point I added all the details (tree trunk, flowers, stars, particles, and lines).

For the leaves in the wind, I used particles: 5 emitters, 6 leaf meshes in a group (pink, yellow, green, and blue, with a material for them) and converted the particles.

3. The rig

I prefer to establish a rig before painting because sometimes you need to update the mesh for the rig. I used bendy bones mostly but not for the eyes.

I did not use shape keys to deform the symetricality of the face.

I created a lot of groups for the bones to differentiate them. And I created custom shapes for control bones.

Deform bones:

Control bones:

Mechanism bones:

For the corner of the lips, I created a deform bone to form the commissures.

And, finally, I deformed the face with this rig. And I added a pose in the pose library.

4. Paint

I painted the albedo first with Blender for the tint and then finalized it with Krita. I made a specular map for the eyes.

5. Materials

The skin:

The cornea:

6. Compositing

I painted the background in Krita and added some compositing in Blender.

7. Finalising

After multiple corrections of proportions, here is a comparison:

And that’s it.

About the Author

Damien Monteillard, 3D Generalist