First post after over four years I think. Trying to get back to personal art. This character started off as a stylized character. Sculpted in Zbrush, and tried to implement some techniques picked up from the amazing portraiture class by Kris Costa. The skin was detailed using a bunch of custom brush and alphas I made specifically for this piece, it was also textured in Zbrush, using HD Geometry. The specular, sss, roughness maps were made in Zbrush as well the pose. I leveraged Zbrush’s awesome new feature - Dynamics to simulate the cape, and some of his other costume pieces then manually sculpted some of the folds on top.
The props were textured in Substance Painter, as well as their displacement/height maps. I have used Arnold GPU to render the piece to test out how much load it can take as my texture size was nearly 10GB alone. I normally use Xgen Core, but for this piece I followed Kris Costa’s workflow for hair using Xgen’s Interactive Groom. It is so intuitive, as it makes grooming feel like Zbrush’s sculpting with layers. However, it does have some limitation and are generally not used for production.