Stylized Saruman: Lord of the Rings

Stylized Saruman from "Lord of the rings" based off the wonderful concept art by: Met Mangindaan... (see bottom image or follow link) https://www.artstation.com/artwork/loqeJ

I started this a long time ago and always wanted to finish it, however; I didn't have experience at the time with creating realistic hair and I felt I needed to understand that first before getting too deep into this. So recently I tried fibermesh and xgen for this project and ended up sorta doing a hybrid approach as I wanted to use marmoset 4 for rendering (not arnold). So I blocked the hair out in fibermesh, but didn't use that other then for practice and getting a feel for the hair. Then I made the hair from scratch in xgen using my fiber mesh hair as reference, created splines from the xgen hair and exported hair geo tubes (6 sided cylinders with anywhere from 20-120 loops) to zbrush to adjust them further. The porosity was done by using a scan from 3d scan store which gave a subtle but much needed effect I feel. So I did the standard zwrap/morph/layer trickery to grab the porosity from hd_head scan male_01. If you want to know more about this process there are lots of tutorials covering it at the 3d scan store: https://www.3dscanstore.com/blog . The sculpt itself was done from a sphere in zbrush and polypainted in zbrush as well to create the albedo map. I used substance painter and photoshop to make the gloss, and spec, along with adjusting and painting as needed ontop of the polypaint from earlier. I exported and linked everything to marmoset so I could streamline updates as I went. All in all, its a similar workflow to doing a realistic head for the most part. AND... That's pretty much it, but feel free to ask if any of you have questions. Hope you like it, and thanks for looking!

Marmoset 4 Beauty Render Cropped

Marmoset 4 Beauty Render Cropped

Marmoset Real-Time Turntable Video.

Closeup Beauty Render: Marmoset 4

Closeup Beauty Render: Marmoset 4

Environment Tests: Screen Grabs Marmoset 4 (click to see full res)

Environment Tests: Screen Grabs Marmoset 4 (click to see full res)

Marmoset 4 Beauty Render

Marmoset 4 Beauty Render

Marmoset Un-edited Screen Grab

Marmoset Un-edited Screen Grab

Marmoset Un-edited Screen Grab Close

Marmoset Un-edited Screen Grab Close

Materials

Materials

Xgen Breakdown

Xgen Breakdown

Initial Fibermesh Block-in

Initial Fibermesh Block-in

Zbrush Sculpting Timelapse

Zbrush Sculpting Timelapse

Simple Zbrush Sculpt BPR Render and Flat Shaded polypaint demo

Simple Zbrush Sculpt BPR Render and Flat Shaded polypaint demo

Simple Zbrush Sculpt BPR Render Closeup, and Flat Shaded polypaint demo

Simple Zbrush Sculpt BPR Render Closeup, and Flat Shaded polypaint demo

Inspired by this concept by Met Mangindaa: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/loqeJ

Inspired by this concept by Met Mangindaa: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/loqeJ