Hi there.
I was always admiring all those great likeness sculpts I’ve seen around here.
So I decided to make one myself.
I chose Jeff because I enjoy his movies, especially the classic “the big lebowsky”
Sculpting, texturing and hairstyle was all done in zbrush. Rendering was done in 3dsmax with vray.
I hope you like the result.
superb got his smile down pat,amazes me you portrait artists love it
Great likeness! Excellent job on this! 
I just saw this on my Instagram feed, and I want it to say this, for year I’ve been watching 3d characters trying to get as photorealistic as possible but one thing always gives it away, the eyes, idk if you did use a pic of the real actor or if you model them (which makes you awesomer) but you nail it, for the first time in all my years I finally saw the soul captured in his eyes, I didn’t notice at first that was from zbrushcentral and since I follow a few photographer I was thinking at first glimpse that it was a medium format photo because of the detail, I was thinking and saying to myself, hey this guy really enhanced the guys eyes and with a nice rim lighting, then for the first time I noticed that I was watching a 3d sculpture and of course you go for the common tale tales like the hair but if it wasn’t coming from zbcentral I never had search for those details, all in all man really amazeballs congrats.
I really appreciate your kind words, drpixel.
And I want to share the process how I made the eyeballs.
The eyeballs started as a side project, because I thought it’s always good to have a realistic eye.
So I tried to improve my former eyeball model
I checked some anatomical reference to get the bowing of the cornea and its size realation to the eyeball correct. (1.)
Another thing was to have the iris as a separate object.
which I modelled in zbrush (3.) Instead of doing the iris concave which is done by a lot of artists to capture the light better I decided to stick to more correct anatomical approach and do it convex (1.)
I searched for some reference pictures with the eyeball under extreme lighting conditions (2.) This helped me to understand that the gradual transition bordering the iris between the cornea and the sclera
casts a soft shadow onto the iris. (2. & 5.)
Also these extreme lighting conditions helped me to understand how far the light travels within the eyeball and the iris and how much SSS I have to use.
(4.) Here are some wires of the eye model in 3Ds max. The iris was decimated in zbrush and exported (the lazy way :). The iris is a lot thinker in my 3D model compared to the anatomical reference (4.). I had to do this to deal with
rendering problems when doing raytraced SSS for the sclera and iris.
The way the eye is built makes it also very flexible. To make the eyes look older I just have to adjust a gradient map (5.) to make a softer transition between the sclera and cornea. If I want the shadows on the iris to be darker and more spread out I just have to push the iris a little back within the eyeball.
Despite the eyeball I went back a lot of times to get the eyelids right. Really subtle changes of the eyelids changed the expression a lot.
Hope this small tutorial is usefull to the community.
This is so great and full of Life : )
That’s some awesome work…I really love it…
could you please elaborate on your technique for using fibermesh…I mean your workflow and brush settings to arrive at this result with hair…fibermesh Imo could be difficult a bit to drive…thanks
Looks great, couldn’t do it better myself. Something that struck me right away is that it seems he has no eyelashes. But maybe they’re not really noticable on him, in either case looks great.
I think my fibermesh workflow is nothing special.
First I dublicated the head mesh. Chose a medium subDiv level and made several polygroup clusters for the head.
After growing the hair I used the groom hairball brush to better seperate the different clusters. Then I used the groom short hair brush on a low intensity to comb each cluster down starting at the neck area.
Generally I don’t like most of the groom brushes or I don’t understand how to properly use them. The best way for me to handle the long hair clusters was to isolate the polygroup and use the move brush combined with smoothing. To seperate even finer strands
masking a couple of hairs out with the mask brush works great. To get more definition into single strands the pinch brush is also hard to beat.
For the beard and eyebrows I liked to use the groom magnet brush (lightbox)
I have the feeling that the default intensity for most groom brushes is way to high.
Concerning the eyelashes. He has hardly noticeable eyelashes. Light in color and not many of them. Additionally his hanging upper eyelid kinda hides them in shadow.
Maybe I should have made them a little more pronounced.
thanks alot frix for the insight…
Amazing likeness! It blows my mind!
Makes me want to watch the Big Lebowski once again!
Thanks for sharing your eyeball process.
great job already tried to do this way more eyes always lose the reflection on the iris would be cool you share eye shader if possible
love it
