Recreating a Historical Portrait in 3D

Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter & Marvelous Designer Workflow with Mahmoud Salah

Recreate a historical 3D portrait of King Akhenaten using Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, XGen, Marvelous Designer and Arnold. Mahmoud Salah, character and creature artist, takes artists on a journey of discovery, starting with a scan of an ancient statuetogether with a modern-day human head scan that he projects onto the ancient statue to help reimagine the historical figure. 

With the sculpt and facial details defined in ZBrush, Mahmoud uses Substance Painter to carefully align and enhance the skin texture. He instructs how to use Arnold for the look development process and how to leverage the esteemed Skin Shader, and dives deep into the eye setup and rendering workflow for realistic CG eyes. 

The hair grooming is handled using XGen in Maya to help push the realism of the artwork to the next level with hyper-realistic brows, lashes, and stubble. To adorn the character, in the final stage of the workshop, Mahmoud creates key accessories for the King, demonstrating his workflow for modeling and texturing a headdress and ornamental collar to display the character in its full glory. 

The goal of this workshop is to teach the skills artists need to reconstruct and reimagine any historical character in 3D.