Kris Costa – Fly On The Wall – Native American Course

"What to expect
An open window to the entire process, showing how I work on my personal art, in real-time, for about a month.

An artistic approach to likeness and realism, with the intention to learn with the process of observing the natural forms in the real world and with that understanding, make possible for you to freely idealize realism without the need of using ready made tools, alphas, images etc. You can expect a very dense yet easy to understand content. "

Course structure

Lesson 1 - Overall explanation about the class' structure, camera lenses, likeness, cranium shape, brief introduction to skin and surface anatomy, blocking the forms from a planar head basemesh

Lesson 2 - Likeness progress: more references added, nostrils, ears, lips, eyes, overall sculpture continued

Lesson 3 - Eyes sizes, distances, rotation, render settings, HDRI sources, HDRI and area lights, first render tests

Timelapse #1

Timelapse #2

Timelapse #3

Lesson 4 - Mesh planning, UVs planning, sketch reprojection into new topology with ZWrap, Alien Skin Xposure Demo, more scultpting

Lesson 5 - Pores constrution, pores arrays, sculpting with pores stamps, exporting and rendering displacement maps

Lesson 6 - Wrinkles, blending wrinkles and pores, microgeometry, displacement render tests

Lesson 7 - Bump height map, specular map, micro-bump + displacement render tests, skin shader update, directional wrinkles

Lesson 8 - sculpting the lips, more blending of wrinkles and pores, nose bridge and forehead sculpting

Review Sessions 1: Morning Reviews

Review Sessions 1: Night Reviews

Lesson 9 - Polypainting the albedo maps and rendering them to test

Lesson 10 - Eyes explored: model, sculpting, scale, distance, shaders, textures, rendering

Lesson 10b - Iris Sculpt Timelapse

Lesson 11 - Model improvements: ears, chin, cheeks, nose, eyebags, neck detail and refinements. More skin randomness added

Lesson 12 - Introduction to XGen, grooming eyelashes and peachfuzz

Lesson 13 - Grooming the eyebrows with XGen, updates on the skin, HDRI and camera tricks

Lesson 14 - Grooming the main hair with XGen Interactive + Guides

Polypainted Maps Examples (all in progress, but a good base reference)

Lesson 15 - Braids, Hair Update, Eyelid Tweaks

Lesson 16 - Final meeting: recap of all main points, braids grooming update, post effects, industry talk, clothing shading