Some personal project created with the main idea to create a storytelling image to show how we all struggle sometimes with a lack of creativity.

I sculpted the character from zero in Blender. For references, I searched for and watched a lot of images on Pinterest of real artists, especially painters, to see how they look, what they like to wear, their studios, etc.

Because I had decided that this would be a static render and for the sake of saving time, I didn't do manual retopology. Instead, I used a great add-on called Quad Remesher. I think the result was pretty nice for a 2-second retopo tool.

You can see that the head and the body are not connected to each other, but I knew that my character would wear a scarf, so that area would not be visible in the final render. After UV unwrapping (nothing special here, just a regular unwrap with seams), I started to sculpt the skin details with a multires modifier and with some skin brushes from Sculptors Toolbox, which I found on Blender Market.

Then I baked that in a normal map, painted colors, SSS, and all the other stuff, and got the result:

I created hair, brows, and a beard with a standard hair particle system. Each of the areas uses only one particle setting.

For modeling the clothing, Marvelous Designer was a huge help. After a quick rig with Rigify, I did a simple animation, from A-pose to the pose that I decided my character would be in, and then exported it in Alembic. Then I imported the Alembic file into Marvelous, modeled the cloth in A-pose, played the animation, and...that's it, my character has clothes!

The beautiful thing about Marvelous Designer is that it gives you perfect UVs, just as clothes have seams in real life. And also, it has its built-in retopo tools. For this project I used automatic retopo, which is not good for animation, but for this kind of static render it does a great job.

Modeling the environment was pretty standard—just box modeling random stuff that I saw in artists’ studios, and filling the scene. At the beginning, I filled the scene randomly, which didn’t look nice, so I tried a composition method using Fibonacci's ratio. For that, I modeled the ratio with curves, made it a child of the camera, and fit it to my render resolution. This way, whenever I moved the camera the ratio was always in the right place. In Blender it looks like this.

And the final scene:

The lighting setup is very simple, just two lights coming from the window, one backlight, and an HDRI.

Rendered in Cycles in 2000 samples, about 30 minutes on my I7-8700, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070 TI video card. After rendering, I did a tiny bit of post-processing in Photoshop.

Thank you for scrolling :)