Alexander Beim presents the Making of Bruce Lee Portrait in this article. Don’t miss a time lapse video making of on the last page!
“I myself have always been a fanatic of Bruce Lee. And of course I was always very sorry that he passed away prematurely. With the development of 3D technology was not hard to imagine that one day completely replace live actors 3d characters to be realistic as well as the living, but that will only be a hundred percent the will and plan of directors. And if such is possible, and we can assume that the actors who have died, will also be taking part in the films of the future. In principle, this has spurred me to try to do first portrait of Bruce Lee, well into the future it is possible to create an animation with him.”
Research of references for the character design
The first thing I started it with a collection of various pictures of Bruce Lee. In the face of the person to be recognized, the accuracy is very important. Sometimes even one millimeter line eyes or nose can make a person very different. But unfortunately due to the fact that in 70 years, the cameras were not as good as today, I could not find a large enough and sharp pictures. So we had to rethink a lot of them to soak up his appearance and take for themselves the characteristics of his face.
Making a rough model with DynaMesh
I started to work intuitively. And to the great happiness in Zbrush for now has DynaMesh. I love DynaMesh just because of that I do not necessarily know in advance what I want, and I can in the process of change shape as I see fit. So I started experimenting with a person with DinoMesh. When I realized that the basic shape is similar, I have transgressed the creation of a regular topology model. The work was not in vain, I decided at once to create a good topology suitable for further facial animation.
Making the Low Poly model with good topology and UV’s
This mesh was created in Maya. Topology of the lot can be said for a long time. Of course before I started making the good topology mesh was a lot of trial and error in previous years. Based on their previous experience, I knew exactly what should be the topology to the model could be used in the future for the animation. Similarly, UV I created in Maya. The model was ready. After that, I exported a good topology shape with the coordinates of textures to Zbrush.
Transferring the rough model layout to Low Poly base
After importing the correct mesh, I drove it with the projection tools in Zbrush on a model created from DynaMesh. Further, I have only worked with the new model, which I created in Maya. I tried to work with HD Geometry, but the method I do not quite like it, because it was not possible to work with layers. So I increased the level of detail to seven. And then my computer, of course, was not good. It is unfortunate that Zbrush still not 64 bit.
