ULTRA-REALISTIC H.P. LOVECRAFT PORTRAIT

Truth be told, there are not many surviving photographs of the great horror/science-fiction author, H.P. Lovecraft. However, graphic artist Khoi Nguyen gave it his best shot by using as many reference photos he could find to digitally render a very realistic portrait of the writer using ZBrush and other digital tools. The result is remarkable.

Making an Ultra-Realistic Portrait of H.P. Lovecraft

Khoi Nguyen has told us about the working process behind the realistic portrait of H.P. Lovecraft and shared some thoughts on achieving the likeness.

Interview by Theodore Nikitin | November 1, 2021 | 80.lv

Introduction

Hello, my name is Khoi Nguyen, I have been working in the game/VFX industry as a 3D Character Artist for ten years. I started as a 3D modeler at Virtuos-Sparx – an outsourcing studio for the game and film industry in Saigon and had a chance to work on various games and VFX projects.

After seven years at Sparx, I moved to some local studios working on inhouse-projects. For the last two years, I decided to work from home as a freelancer and also take time to learn something new. Then I joined Kris Costa's LIVE class. From that, I started going deep into portrait art.

H.P. Lovecraft Project

Lovecraft's one of my favorite authors and I'm a big fan of the Cthulhu cosmic world. I find a lot of 2D artworks of him and his creations but not in 3D. So I thought why not make a portrait of him or even a full character. I worked on this project in my free time for two months. To accomplish the task, I used ZBrush, Substance Painter, Maya, Arnold, and XGen.

For this project, I decided to start from scratch and begin with sculpting the head from a sphere. I gathered a lot of references like his pictures and people's sculptures. Like every single portrait out there, likeness's always the most difficult part because there are not many photos of him on the internet and they vary in age and lighting. It's very much of a conflict so I had to find one that would fit my concept.

When the overall form's relatively good, I used a Retopology Base Mesh and fit it into my sculpted head by projection in ZBrush. I've created a collection of brushes for the details like pores, wrinkles, and pimples following the Kris Costa method. Displacement Maps were baked using MultiMap Exporter in ZBrush. You could use my settings below as a reference. I exported the head with SubDivision 2 for more volume. Adaptive should be turned off because it will make the baking process longer but make no difference in the end.

Read the full article about the process HERE.