The Simulant

It's been a tough few years for the VFX industry. I've dedicated my time to improving and learning new skills.

Allow me to introduce you to The Simulant — an aging, tired-looking humanoid.

The goal of this project, as always, was to level up my texturing and look development skills, while also incorporating new ones such as rigging, grooming, lighting, some modeling, and compositing.

As you can see in the images, I've tried to walk you through a bit of the process I follow across all these areas.

The head model comes from Vface by TexturingXYZ. The hard surface was modeled by https://www.artstation.com/alessandroluppino

I used Maya, Substance Painter, Houdini, Arnold, and Nuke.

I'd also like to give a huge thanks to my friend Ritunjay Kothari for his invaluable help with compositing — he provided feedback and taught me some great tricks to improve my work.

I hope you like it,
Samuel Solla.