Portrait with Waves — award-winning hyperreal portrait.
The portrait that has travelled furthest for me. Sculpted entirely in ZBrush, with the wave hair built through mesh booleans and dynamic subdivision rather than simulated, and rendered in Blender Cycles under custom HDRI. ZBrush Top Row 2021, CG Society Hall of Fame, and the November 2021 print edition of 3D World Magazine.
- ZBrush Top Row 2021
- CG Society Hall of Fame 2021
- 3D World Magazine Nov 2021
What the awards were for
ZBrush Top Row is the highest recognition the ZBrush community gives a single artwork, and this took it in 2021, alongside induction into the CG Society Hall of Fame. 3D World ran it in print that November. I mention all this because it is the clearest outside answer to whether my portrait work holds up.
Sculpted hair, not simulated hair
No particle system, no hair sim. Every strand and flow is modelled by hand in ZBrush, then refined with DynaMesh and ZRemesher. It is slower, and it is the reason the silhouette does exactly what I wanted. Procedural hair gives you volume; it does not give you that.
Skin shader and clay rotations
The gallery has the hero and 3/4 renders, the left profile and the skin pass, plus ZBrush clay rotations from blocking through to the final Cycles presentation. If you are judging a portrait artist, the clay rotations tell you more than the finished render does.
Project gallery
More views, clay renders and material passes.
