Since I’m feeling all Halloweenish lately, I got inspired to create a portrait of my favorite witch, Elphaba, the ‘Wicked Witch of the West.’ I began by posing a Victoria model in Poser. I also posed, and then separated out, the Morphing Hat for Michael, a simple dress model, and a cape (BVH Elf cape).
The general pose was set up in Poser, prior to exporting the meshes, which gave me a good base to start from.
I exported the various pieces, head, body, hat, cape, dress, as Wavefront .obj files, and then imported them into ZBrush. Once they were in ZBrush, I could increase the polygon count tremendously, and sculpt and model the various pieces to my liking.
In ZBrush I sculpted the face, neck, and arm, which were the only body parts that would show in the final piece. I then textured them, making them into fully textured 3D objects that I could move around and experiment with. I toyed with various material settings until I got something I liked for all the pieces. I created new eyes directly in ZBrush.
Once I was happy with each of the pieces, I then started placing them onto the ZBrush canvas, which turns them into non-movable but still 3D painting elements. I continued to paint and sculpt until the entire figure was put together, along with the clothing. Then I spent some time lighting the result, and rendered the figure in ZBrush.
After that, I imported the image into Photoshop. There, I added the hair and various background and foreground elements, and did some tweaking and over-painting to finish the image. I created a simple greenish night sky using VUE and added that to the overall composite. (Instant Hair 3 brushes, spiritsigh brushes, and some designfera brushes were used).
And here’s the result. I can almost hear the flying monkeys…
[attach=40532]elphaba.jpg[/attach]
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