"Thomas" - Portrait of a Fisherman

Long time no see! This is a project i've been fiddling with on and off for a few months now, and one that started off with a rummage through the family photo albums on my last visit home—one that unearthed an old picture of my great-great-grandfather Thomas Van Wulpen. Like most of my ancestors, he was a fisherman in my hometown of Blankenberge and, keeping with tradition, was given a "lapnoame" or sailor's nickname—and for most of his life out at sea, people knew him as "Schele Tone" or "cross-eyed Tom"... can you imagine why?

As soon as I saw him staring at me through the lens with his one good eye, I knew I'd found the perfect opportunity to push the skills I've learned over the past year and a half as a facial modeler, and challenge myself with a realistic likeness of great-great-grandpa. My primary focus for this portrait went into sculpting realistic skin details, rendering using Arnold, and getting more comfortable using xGen Interactive by creating a groom from scratch; eyebrows, hat hair, peach fuzz and all. I even decided to try and create his knitted jumper using curves and sweep meshes in Maya, which certainly isn't the most optimized way to go about it but it was a lot of fun getting into digital knitting..!

The old man was sculpted in Mudbox using scan-based displacement as a base with a whole lot of manual sculpting on top, the fiddler cap and coat were made in Marvelous Designer, texturing was done in Painter, grooming was done with xGen and rendering was done using Arnold for Maya. When I showed the finished renders to my grandpa—who in his old age has started looking so very much like his own grandpa—all he had to say was "he always hated wearing that suit".

Thank you for looking!