Christopher Walken

Edit: after some useful advice from Magnavis, I’ve added some SSS, which has made a huge difference, as seen in the before/after.

Original post: After posting my first attempt at sculpting a person 3 weeks ago (Ian McKellen (AKA Magneto) - First attempt), I made a real effort to improve the likeness and overall quality of my output. I think I’ve managed to achieve that with my Christopher Walken sculpt, but now it’s done I can see lots of niggly details that need to be improved when it comes to my next sculpt.

I also need to get over my dislike of modeliing clothes :slight_smile:

After SSS was added

Before SSS

4 Likes

Really good likeness!

Not sure how much focus you’re putting on the actual render and skin shader, but it would really benefit from some SSS.

2 Likes

Yeah, that’s something I haven’t found a good tutorial on. Is sss best applied in substance painter or blender? And would I need a thickness map?

Definitely in Blender. If you’re using the Principled shader, try setting the color to red, and play with the subsurface value.
image

If your model is real world scale, then a value of around 0.015 will probably be sufficient. If it’s bigger, then just play around until it looks right. A good way to test it, is to turn off all lights in the scene, and place a single bright light behind your model. You can then judge your SSS value by seeing how much light scatters through the ears.

If you want to learn more about the overall portraiture workflow, then I highly recommend the HUMAN course bt Kent Trammell which goes into enormous detail.

1 Like

This is really useful, thank you!

1 Like

Edit: I figured it out. The eyelids were too thin in those areas.

I’ve put the sss adviuce into practise and it looks a lot more realistic but also threw up strange dark artefacts under the eyes. Does anyone know what might cause this? I guess as a work around I can remove the sss from those areas.

1 Like

Well done, great likeness!

And dang, that reminds me that I did not watch The Prophecy (or God’s Army, as it’s titled in Germany) for a decade or so…

1 Like

Thank you!

1 Like