LogInJean Zoudi talked about the challenges of approaching likeness in his 3D model of Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang from Everything Everywhere All at Once, discussing hand-sculpting the outfit and sharing some tips for beginner artists.
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Introduction
Heya! My name’s Jean Zoudi, and I’m a French character artist working in the games industry. The last time I had the chance to write for 80 Level about my Harrier Du Bois project, I was working at Supermassive Games, mostly on The Casting of Frank Stone, which has recently been released. I left Supermassive a few months earlier, and I’m now super excited to be part of the amazing team at No Code Studio working on Silent Hill: Townfall!
On the personal projects side, I’ve kept working on different characters and creatures since then, and I also had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with the incredibly talented Jonjo Hemmens on his Disco Elysium project. I’m also thrilled to share that we're preparing something new together!
Evelyn Wang
I’ve always been a huge fan of the Daniels, the filmmaker duo that brought us the amazing Swiss Army Man and other brilliant short films and music videos (especially love the Joywave – Tongues one).
When they released Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022, it struck me with the amount of creativity, design, and fun that went into this masterpiece, and it instantly became my favorite film. I also loved Michelle Yeoh’s performance as Evelyn Wang and have been thinking about trying to recreate this character in 3D.
Likeness has always been something that fascinated me but also a great challenge, one of the hardest things to achieve in character art, I believe, since it’s so easy to make it look wrong and off, which is what happened to a few of my previous likeness attempts.
However, it’s such an interesting exercise! I learn a ton at each new attempt and always want to start a new one.
I’ve also been lucky enough to get extremely valuable feedback and advice from the amazing Luis Omar and Jake Lamb, who are both immensely talented character artists, thanks, guys!
The actual project started, as always, by getting a lot of references. I got some from Michelle Yeoh’s photoshoots or event appearances, but the majority came from the actual movie since that was the main goal. I rewatched it once, then chose a specific moment of the film that would become my main reference in terms of pose, damages, hair, etc. This one was towards the end of the movie when Evelyn starts her "empathy fight" with a slight smile and the googly eye on her forehead, an extra detail that I liked.
After that, I just took a lot of references from different angles at various moments and with a similar or neutral expression. I assembled everything on a PureRef and was ready to start!
Modeling
I like to start my characters with a rough technical goal in mind, for this one, I wanted to focus on the likeness and the head, so I decided not to worry too much about the body or the back and just make a bust solely seen from the front and sides. I didn’t want to add any constraints regarding topology or texture size either.
First off, I started with this base head from 3D Scan Store that I bought a while ago. I really like using their scans, they’re all nicely detailed, cleaned up, and ready to be sculpted!
After prepping my ZBrush file and my refs, I finally started sculpting the primary shapes. These are obviously the most important ones since they define anatomy and likeness, that’s where I spent most of my time, really.
The biggest challenge here is to use the references correctly: making sure not to get confused with the focal length of the references, not focusing too much on a single ref, and looking at different lighting scenarios are 3 crucial elements to keep in mind here. It’s something I always struggle with and I try to get better at each time.
Another challenge is to keep fresh eyes on the character, working on your sculpt for hours makes you get used to it and not seeing the issues anymore, your brain starts to "project" what it wants to see on it. That’s why I think it’s very important to take breaks and resume your work later.
My last advice on sculpting likeness would be to accept that your sculpt will look off and weird for a while which can be very frustrating, but if you manage to keep motivation, it should get there eventually!
I usually add a very rough blockout of hair and clothes to help get a better idea of the result, hairstyles change a lot of how we perceive the face, so it’s a good idea to add it early. However, keep in mind that it will make the head look slightly fake during lookdev until you replace the blockouts with the finished assets, even if the isolated head looks realistic.
Once I got the main shapes done, I started working on secondary and tertiary shapes. There is not much to add there; I just observed the refs and sculpted while relying on anatomy.
I do believe it’s important to start the lookdev quite early, the head will usually look very different in the engine with proper lights and camera. That’s why I’d recommend adding basic textures and importing your model and placeholder assets in the rendering engine as soon as you start to be happy with the head. It will make a lot of issues pop out right away!
I started working on the final hair once I was sure the main head shapes were done and wouldn’t change any more. I used XGen Core to get a nice groom for the main hair, then I duplicated it and reduced the amount a lot to add a layer of flyaway gray hair. I also made eyebrows there and exported everything as meshes when I knew I was going to use Marmoset for my renders.
The final clothes were the last assets I made for the project. I decided to create the full shirt and jacket to get some nice renders from various distances but didn’t bother with hands or lower body. I started by roughly DynaMeshing the head to a base body to be my avatar and then made the clothes on top in Marvelous Designer. Once happy with the shapes, I added an extra layer underneath to get a better-looking thickness and pressure for the jacket. Then I used Marvelous Designer's retopology tools to export a clean low poly version to be my base mesh in ZBrush. It's a bit tedious, but it does make the next steps more straightforward. Being done with MD, I exported my meshes unwelded and without thickness (I’ll add it later).
Back in ZBrush, I imported the low- and high-poly versions of the clothes, added some thickness using Edgeloop, and projected the details from the simulation. Next comes a big fixing phase to adjust each separated piece and correct the issues with the help of morph targets and ZModeler. After that, I started actually hand-sculpting the outfit, adding folds, damages, and wrinkles to give a more natural look to the fabric.
Since I was using a 3D Scan Store base head, the head topology/UVs were already set up. For the outfit, I relied a lot on my Marvelous retop and pretty much used it with thickness for the final models. It's not optimized at all, but again, I wasn’t aiming for a game-ready model. I unwrapped everything in Maya without worrying too much about the texture size and sets but still kept in mind the way I wanted the textures to tile later.
Texturing
For baking and texturing, I used Substance 3D Painter as I always do, it gave me good results overall, just had to fix a couple of issues on the AO and normal maps and I was then able to start the final texturing.
For the head, the scanned textures were a base, but I added quite a lot of details in my sculpt, so I added the new baked cavity, normal, and AO on top of the base textures, and then I painted extra layers to stick to my refs. The usual red/blue/yellow layers are always handy to make skin look more natural. I also made the eye areas darker and added dirt and sweat to match the scene. Lastly, I added a haircap and painted the cut and blood using the awesome Jasper Vick’s Blood material.
As for the outfit, I made simple fabric materials and added some curvature, dirt, and damages on top. The ID map I baked from my ZBrush polypaint also helped to quickly fill out the darker lines of the jacket. Same for the shirt, but I also made a custom flowery pattern with an image I found on Etsy that I recolored and tweaked in Photoshop, and that was it!
Rendering & Lighting
At first, I wanted to go down my usual path and render in UE5 and started setting my scene up there, but after a few tests, I thought I’d try and go back to Marmoset Toolbag, which I hadn't really used for a few years. I figured it would be nice to get raytraced lighting from an HDR, the simplicity and quality of Marmoset convinced me as well. It just matched what I wanted for this project. I got my HDR from PolyHaven, they offer crazy good resources for free!
As I mentioned before, I started lookdeving quite early during the likeness process, so I did a lot of back and forth between ZBrush and Marmoset once I was starting to be happy with the primary shapes and got some basic textures done. I really enjoyed having my model and textures automatically updated after exporting stuff from ZBrush or Substance 3D Painter.
Later I imported my hair groom from xGen as a mesh and made a simple peachfuzz using ZBrush FiberMesh to get that extra detail. Next, I added the final outfit and started setting up my lighting. The raytracing already looked great and realistic without the need for too many extra lights, so I just added one to get an extra sparkle in the eyes and a rim light to make her pop a bit more from the background.
I used Marmoset post-effects to slightly tweak the colors and add some film grain to get it closer to my refs, hit render, and done!
Conclusion
It took about a month to finish this project in my spare time. I'm quite happy with the result (even if it could always be better, of course) and learned a lot along the way. The biggest challenge is obviously to get the model to look realistic and similar to the actress, which is a long and tedious process, but a very rewarding one!
My advice to beginner character artists would be to always try to work on personal projects that are important to them in some way because that’s how you stay motivated and efficient. Don’t hesitate to ask for feedback, especially from people you look up to or who know what they’re talking about. They’ll always have invaluable tips for you to get better, usually some stuff you wouldn’t have thought of yourself or by googling!
Especially in these times, remember that working, learning, and talking about how to create is not only enriching to your portfolio but also to you as a person. Struggling and failing is part of the process, and you should embrace that, it means that you’re growing as an artist, and that’s an accomplishment nothing else can offer you.