INTRODUCTION
Hello everyone! My name is Mateusz Siedliski, but you can call me xrev_v. I’m 22 and hail from Poland. I started using Blender as a pandemic hobby and look where we are now.
I specialize in the use of procedural shaders on human meshes to create abstract portraits.
INSPIRATION
I started this project like almost every other one, by jumping straight into nodes and just experimenting. There was no reference—just raw fun with textures.
MODELING
I started with a base human mesh from MB-Lab addon. The empty is used as an anchor for the displacement, lights and depth of field.
SHADING
Then, I jumped straight into the node system where I spent most of the time.
First, let’s talk about displacement. I used a lot of procedural noise to create a mask which drives the effect. This set up consists of Math nodes, Color Ramps, Noise texture and Voronoi texture shaders.
This is the effect of the Noise texture added with the Voronoi shader.
With base effect ready, it’s time for some colours. Here, I use a combination of displacement textures with geometry info to create the albedo map. This set up includes a lot of Color ramps and Mix RGBs.
LIGHTING
Now, it was time for some lighting. I usually don’t use any HDRIs. Everything was done with simple area lights, constrained to be directed at the empty.
With a quick background, we’re ready to render.
COMPOSITION
In the compositor, each pass was saved to a separate file, which gave me much more freedom during the compositing phase. For denoising, I used Super Image Denoiser addon. It gives much cleaner results than the default Blender denoiser.
For compositing, I mostly use Affinity Photo, Luminar 4 and Nik Collection.
vnc|nt
Thank you for reading this article and have a great day!
About the Artist
Mateusz Siedliski, a 3d artist and a pixel arranger from Poland. He started as a Blender hobbyist but now he creates unique abstract portraits as a pixel arranger.
