Recreate A Stylised Portrait In 3D

Use some of Maya’s more advanced tools to recreate a stylised concept in 3D

- Antony Ward

For a few years now I’ve been exploring another aspect to my art skills, and have instead focused more on digital painting in my spare time than sculpting or modelling. I felt that my 2D skills were waning so wanted to bring them back up to a reasonable level where I wasn’t terrified if a client asked for a concept. As you can see, my portraits are a little strange. I much prefer the more stylised approach when it comes to artwork, I find it more interesting to create and to look at.

Up to now these two sides of my career have remained separate, so I thought it would be fun to take one of my concepts and recreate her in glorious 3D. What’s more, I thought I’d share the process with you lucky readers, so you can do the same.

Now, we aren’t going to create an exact, one-for-one replication of the concept. As with anything that’s created in two dimensions, sometimes an exact 3D copy doesn’t look right. Instead we will take inspiration from its style and proportions to recreate the portrait using some of today’s top techniques, like the Arnold skin shader and Maya’s XGen tools to replicate the hair.

As you can imagine, this is a lengthy process, so I’ve tried to cover the key areas here, but for a more detailed tutorial please follow the accompanying videos.

01 GATHER YOUR REFERENCE

Before embarking on any project it’s essential to have a folder of reference at your disposal, but having these images readily available while you work can be troublesome. A great free application I use is Kuadro, (kruelgames.com/tools/kuadro). Not only can you position your reference material around your screen, but you can also store the layout for future use.