Jeff Daniels as the outlaw Frank Griffin
Unreal - animation
Unreal - turnaround
Unreal - cinematic shot
ZBrush sculpt - gray (click to enlarge)
ZBrush sculpt - color (click to enlarge)
Unreal - viewport and lighting schemes
Maya - XGen strands, XGen guides, wireframe
Maps for Cavity, Albedo and Normals were hand authored and integrated into Unreal where they were incorporated into the Methahuman skin shader to create the final material
Pureref board - extensive analysis of Jeff Daniels the actor and Frank Griffin the character
I am pleased to present my portrait of Jeff Daniels as the outlaw Frank Griffin from the Netflix miniseries "Godless." No AI was used in this project.
This character was a huge step forward in challenging myself to create a photorealistic portrait! I created this character as part of Sefki Ibrahim's courses "Hyperreal 3D Character Creation" and "Hyperreal Character Creation in UE5." Sefki's knowledge is simply invaluable when it comes to the complex arena of realistic character modeling.
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Ever since I first watched "Godless", Jeff Daniels' performance as Frank Griffin, the ruthless, charismatic leader of a bandit gang captivated me. So, when I had to pick a subject for the class, he immediately came to mind. I sculpted his likeness in ZBrush using Metahuman as the base body topology. Face textures are sourced from Texturing.XYZ with additional editing to capture Jeff's particular skin and wrinkle patterns.
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The shirt, vest and jacket were originally created in Marvelous Designer with touchups in ZBrush. The hat was modeled from scratch in ZBrush. Textures were baked in Marmoset Toolbag, Albedo maps for skin were authored in Mari and texture maps for clothing were authored in Substance Painter. Strand based hair was created with XGen in Maya. Finally, all source files were integrated into UE 5.6 and imported into Metahuman to take advantage of Control Rig for animation and Metahuman materials for skin, eyes, hair, and clothing. Although Metahuman served as an excellent base, I also executed significant lookdev work to achieve the specific likeness of Jeff Daniels as Frank Griffin, with fine tuning on all aspects until the very end.
The cinematic shot used Epic's "Old West Learning Project" tutorial kit for background assets. Post processing used DaVinci Resolve for animation and Photoshop for stills.
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I always learn a lot from my projects, but this one taught me more than any other! Special thanks to Sefki Ibrahim for his incredible guidance as well as fellow character artist Pablo Poffald who answered all my late-night Unreal questions.