NICHOLAS CAGE FROM SUPERMAN LIVES. STEP-BY-STEP CHARACTER CREATION PROCESS
Recently, the Blacksteinn's lead character artist Andrey Tokarev (https://www.artstation.com/rodgers225) added a new stunning work to his personal portfolio! And decided to share with you the detailed process of creating this masterpiece :) We dare not postpone the story any longer and pass the word to Andrey. In the meantime, give us a like and enjoy reading ;)
Hero's backstory
Back in 1998, there was an idea to create a movie called Superman Lives. The director was to be Tim Burton, and the main role was going to be performed by Nicolas Cage. On YouTube you can find a documentary about what happened to this movie, what ideas were put into it and why it didn't work out.?
After watching this documentary, I was very inspired to create a Superman model based on the concepts and stories highlighted in the movie. I also started to notice a lot of borrowings from Superman Lives in Zack Snyder's movies: Snyder seems to have picked up and developed some of Burton's ideas. For example, Superman's planet and its design by Burton were close to the works of Hans Giger, the creator of Aliens. Plus Burton intended to reveal the psychology of Superman, his dilemmas, and make the character deeper and more depressive. And all of this was reflected to a certain extent in Snyder's work, in my opinion. Also, the first thing Burton wanted to do was to take Superman's costume away from the underpants on top :)
Modeling
I started with the base mesh, which took me about four evenings to complete.
The first thing I wanted to do in the base mesh was to settle on the costume. In the first iterations it turned out to be quite Giger-like, which is what I was going for, but then the design changed a bit.?
After the base mesh, I started working on the head, trying to make the character look as much like Nick as my skills would allow. And it turned out to be a challenge to make Cage's head. It took a dozen iterations before I was satisfied with the result. This is the hardest portrait I've done so far.
Thankfully, I was on vacation at the time and could afford to spend about a week. I started sculpting with a sphere, and when the main features were more or less formed, I took a ready-made LP head and projected everything on a good mesh - then I worked with it. It's hard to emphasize some main points in portrait creation, because everything is important. When you make a real person, there are no unimportant parts. I even had such a case: I made textures, started rendering and my brain didn't want to perceive the model as Nick. It (the brain) saw some uncanny valley, and I couldn't understand what was wrong. But then I tilted the outer parts of the eyebrows a bit, made the upper lip thinner, worked a little on the hair on the eyebrows and eyelashes - and that's it, my brain finally recognized Cage.
All wrinkles, of course, are sculpted manually, but the pores of the skin I took from the scan, in some places finalizing them. But it concerns only the face - everything on the hands is handmade?
As for the suit, after I got the proportions right and started polishing it, it was necessary to make some shapes on the suit as smooth as possible. For this purpose, at first I wanted to make the whole suit under the subdivision, but in the end I did so only the logo, because having started, I realized that this way the task will stretch more than I planned. After all, the vacation was coming to an end, and further I could do the project only in the evening after work late or on weekends. In that case I would spend another two weeks on the suit, but I needed it as soon as possible. So I did a retopology in a couple of evenings, threw the resulting geometry into ZBrush and, with one divide on, projected the details from HP. It didn't save me from normal map bake, but the shading became much closer to the HP.
The cloak was made right away for the final look, as if fluttering in the wind, because I had no intention to animate it. I just wanted to put my Superman in a pose and make static beautiful renders.
Texturing
Once the HP and LP were done up, it was time for textures. Initially I wanted to make the character as realistic as possible - to the best of my ability: to do things I've never done before, like barely noticeable fluff on the face and body, etc. I did my best in textures, and I like the final result :)
When working on product tasks, there is usually a constant rush, and this sometimes prevents you from working through everything as much as your soul asks for. It's very difficult to explain in detail and break down the topic of textures within this article. I'd rather record a video on this topic if the stars align ;).
Now I can only give a little time to it, show screenshots of my textures and tell you why they look like this.
Let's start with the cloak. The documentary said that Burton planned to make the cloak soft, more like a baby blanket. It was supposedly the fabric that a baby was wrapped in before being sent to Earth. I wanted my cloak to look like Snyder's cloak from Man of Steel. There, that element was velvet, but with a silk shimmer, and I wanted to do the same. I ended up with a fairly uncomplicated material, but the look is quite luxurious). I took the node that is responsible for rendering the shading like the Fresnel function in the engine, then adjusted the graph so that I got a "silky" effect. Next, I set colors for dark and light areas, and got a silky sheen on the cloak. Then I added a velvet effect - even Marmoset has this effect today. And the final stage was the normal map created by me in Substance Painter. On it, in addition to the general pattern of the fabric, there are all sorts of lint, small defects of the fabric and the effect of hairiness.
Another interesting material were the eyes.
For them I created three geometries for each eye.
The topmost one is responsible for the glare - this mesh has a glossy material and a normal map with noise to make the glare realistic.?
The second mesh is matte with a vasculature texture. What makes it special is that it has a hole made by an alpha mask with soft edges. There is also subsurface scattering on this material. And the third mesh is the iris mesh, it has a saucer shape with a hole in the middle.
In addition, the geometry around the eye plays an important role, simulating the moist environment in which the eye is located.?
It gives a subtle glare at the border of the eye and eyelids.
For the suit material, I created a tile texture that I combined with my normal map, and the rest of the beauty was created using the standard Arnold material.?
I just rotated the Dispersion Abbe controls on the outer layer and Thin Film on the inner layer.
Hair and final render
The next big step was creating hair. I didn't intend to make the hair in strips. I wanted to create as realistic hair as possible, so I chose the CG hair option, which is created entirely in Ornatrix. I chose this method because the shading of such hair is realistic without any complications.
One of the main problems with hair strips is AO, you need to create a second UV channel and bake shadows from the upper strips to the lower ones, and even then the result can be unsatisfactory. With CG hair there are no such problems: shading of hair weights is done by itself, and you get beautiful deep shadows between the strands.?
I posed the character using bones and skinning. I didn't do any rigging. I didn't plan to make any animations, but I want to make facial blendshapes in the near future.
The backgrounds were made in The Matrix Awakens game on PS5 and then combined with my Photoshop renders.
Thank you for your time! I hope you enjoyed my work. If so, I look forward to likes and comments ;)