Here is my latest project, inspired by Kevin Foote's painting ✨. I wanted to create this piece not only for its beauty, but also for the challenges and learning involved in making it in 3D.
I could go on improving this piece forever, in fact since I know every pore I am also aware of the things I could pour more of my love into, but my other 100 unfinished projects are not going to finish themselves and I didnt want to get too obsessive, so that's it!
I sculpted both in Zbrush. For the girl's face I roughly tried to create something similar to the main reference, but since I only had one perspective to follow I allowed myself to design her likeness as I imagined it could be, picking different features from other references I gathered.
The skin pores, wrinkles and fine details were sculpted by hand in Geometry HD, for which I also had Kris Costa's recorded likeness course as support during the process. It was very helpful and interesting and I learned a lot!
I built the deer's anatomy taking it's not a fully grown deer but a young one, almost a fawn.
I did the girl’s groom with xGen and the deer’s with Yeti. I didn't want to create a perfectly groomed coat for the deer but something more wild and messy, so I looked for references of deers with long and messy fur and followed that.
The dress is done in Marvelous designer with some tweaking in Zbrush.
The skin textures and maps were painted in Zbrush with polypaint. For the dress and the chair I used Substance Painter.
For the deer's pose I decided to rig it with a simple rig and added blendshapes. I had never done a rig before so it's been an interesting experience that I will continue to explore in future.
Shading, lighting and rendering done in Maya and Arnold.
Having two grooms in the scene and one of them being as heavy as the deer's I almost could hear my computer panting in the background :'D
I'll keep posting breakdowns and more renders in other posts!
All aspects by me.