demo sculpt from the Ubisoft workshop
I am recently back from a week-long workshop at Ubisoft’s Quebec studio focused on portraiture and facial anatomy. The week broke down into three days of facial anatomy lecture for twenty of their artists (animators, riggers, concept artist, character artists) and then finished with an intensive two-day portrait sculpting session in ZBrush with just the character artists.
artists sculpting away, and me, the shadowy figure in the corner
The sculpting workshop was a fun way to apply the facial anatomy lessons from earlier in the week. I gave the artists two days to develop a full likeness from scratch (reference from the Faces section of the Bodies in Motion library) and then extend each base portrait with a set of FACS-based sculpted facial expressions. This sounds like a lot to accomplish in two days, and it is, but with all the important facial anatomy fresh in their heads, they were able to make reasonably quick work of the task.
I always like to sculpt a bit myself during these sessions to demonstrate the tools, techniques, and process, so here is a render of where I got to with my demo sculpt (above). And for people interested in the digital sculpting process, here is a timelapse showing what went into sculpting the portrait:
timelapse of my Ubisoft demo sculpt
Finally, an Easter egg for those of you who have read this far. If you are interested in studying digital portrait sculpting with me, this is the first ‘official’ teaser announcement for my Digital Portrait Sculpting online course that will be launching in early 2017. It will cover all the stuff I cover in these workshops for game and VFX studios, and more. Priority will go to alumni of my Facial Anatomy course. Be sure to sign up to the newsletter for further announcements.
beautiful Quebec City