Digi-Double 3D Self Portrait - Georgi Slavov

I am happy to share with you a project I've been working on for the past couple of months during my free time. In 2021, when I started working for DI4D , where we create Realistic Facial Motion Capture for the Video Game and Movie industries, I was offered to have my face scanned for a camera test using a 4D Camera Shoot setup and a High Poly 3D mesh was generated out of those images.
In late 2022 I started my second job as a Teaching Assistant at my old university (Glasgow Caledonian University) where I graduated and got my degree in Computer Games (Art & Animation). I was helping out with the 3D Modeling & Sculpting class and separately with the Advanced 3D Visualisation & Animation class. As we were going along with the Character Sculpting & Modeling workflow, I decided to start working on this Digi-Double of myself to better introduce the workflow to the students and also further develop my skills.
I retopologised and recovered whatever shapes I could from the generated 4D Image in Blender, since you can see that it is quite messy and my beard and moustache created some noisy artifacts on the mesh. After doing so, I combined it with the head mesh of my Pirate Character, to add the rest of the head and a bit of the neck. I brought it to Zbrush to refine the shapes and add more details, such as skin pores and skin creases using different alpha brushes. I modeled the eyes and inner mouth (teeth,gums,tongue) and UV unwrapped each part in Blender. Afterwards, I took the meshes to Quixel Mixer for the texturing stage. This was my first time using Quixel Mixer, so I am glad I had a chance to introduce another texturing software to my library of knowledge of different programmes.
The textures for the eyes and skin had to be revisited a few times in order to get as close as I can to the accurate textures as seen on the images generated from the 4D shoot.
A very long, but fun process was the grooming stage. It definitely made the bust look more human, but I had to learn a lot about the process, since I had not properly done it in Blender and my patience was tested during this process, since my laptop isn't the strongest to generate the best or fastest renders. Finalising the textures and materials for the eyes,definitely made it look less uncanny and the resemblance was getting closer and closer.

When the cosmetic side was done, I went ahead and made a simple rig for the jaw,neck and head. I then took footage of myself doing various expressions and sculpted different blendshapes, which were used to produce the 4 different expression renders as seen above.
I will be doing further blendshapes for this mesh, as that part is not finished yet, but I will post that in a separate project when it is done and perhaps will do some lipsync animations.

Although there is still a lot to learn and further develop, I am glad I managed to push through and stay disciplined and patient during the process.

Keep your eyes open for more down the line and hope you like what you see!