Making of Sarah Machan (Sentient Meat)

Sarah Machan aka. Sentient Meat CGI Portrait

the making of this model was pretty straight forward, I made use of a lot of assets I’ve made in the past, I started out modifying my Joy Model which is a female character I modeled last year that is pretty awesome and flexible, I made it thinking of the kind of flexibility that allowed me to make Sentient fast, eve though it took a LOT of time, I’ll make a post about it in the future.

there is a lot of reference research involved, and took advantage of Sarah’s Instagram account where she uploads tons of head shots.

my main motivation for doing these portraits is the very unique qualities of her face, which admittedly makes the artistic replication a lot easier and identifiable, or at least that’s the impression I got from doing this.

I start the whole process with the standard front and profile photos, and roughly, very roughly modify a low poly basemesh to the approximate dimensions of the Sarah, after that I begin the true process of sculpting Sarah’s face realistically in Z-brush, the hardest part of course is to make an accurate estimation between her face’s dimensions and the distortions in the photographs due to the high angle lens used in whatever phone she uses. the closer the selfie the more exaggerated her facial features become, there is a lot of artistic guessing involved.

once the high resolution sculpt is done I bake displacement maps to the low resolution model, and the model is now ready for texturing, the second step is to texture the sculpt with photo references, I used about 3 or 4, which combined and color corrected complete the whole face and a bit of hairline, i make most of the texturing in Blender and Photoshop, but sometimes I have to turn to Z-brush, In the future I plan to make use of Z-brush more.

After texturing is all done, the skin shader I made for the Joy model works non destructible to build SSS maps, spec, gloss and normals, but I have to admit it’s not 100% perfect.

Next Step is to make the hair, and by far I think this is the hardest process, HOWEVER I cheat at this, I have a new process that I feel it’s better, but for this project I just photoshopped real hair into my renders, not ideal but gets the job done, quick and good. I’ll explain my new process on a different project, I think it’s better.