Meg Griffin

Research

This is key and a good starting base. I look for real people who look similar to the Character I’m making. This offers the best reference points, e.g, Peter Griffin.

I searched for extremely obese males to get a reference on fat deposits around the face and neck areas. I then researched the hair to see how it would fall on that type of head.

I also looked to see if any other Artists had modelled Peter Griffin, sometimes it’s good to take a look to gather more inspiration and ideas.

Sculpting

The programme I use to do all my sculpting is ZBrush.

To save a bit of time, I reused an old head as a base mesh. I started blocking out general forms first on a very low-density mesh. And when I’m happy with the general forms, I usually add a couple of subdivisions to add smaller but important forms.

I found that having good topology from the get-go helps a lot when going into the smaller and finer details. That’s why it is a good idea to plan geometry flow beforehand.

When I’m done with the smaller forms and happy with the overall look, I then move on to detailing the skin.

First I take a look at some good skin reference, there’s a website by Daniel Boschung that I’ve been using for years now.

It’s still one of the best reference sites I have found to date, and I highly recommend you use it too! I also use a variety of different skin alphas and custom brushes, there are loads you can find online.

Texturing

For all my texturing work, I use Substance Painter.

Again, I go back and look for as many reference imagesas  possible. I use a lot of flat images to re-project the base color and then I paint on top.

Hair XGen

With this particular project, I tried to balance between a real and cartoonish style.

It was a little harder for Peter, for the reference I looked for images of men with groomed hair.

Looking for reference for Meg was easier because her hair is straight.

Materials

I used Arnold Render and Arnold Material for these particular characters.
I’ve been using Arnold for some time now, so I usually have a some premade materials that I reuse now and then.

I always try and improve my set of materials and if I’m not sure about something and want to achieve a better result I usually look for tutorials online for the specific material.

For the skin and eyes material I watched tutorial by Arvid Schneider. I find him very easy to follow and usually gets straight to the point.

Lighting, Rendering & Composition

I found lighting the most difficult. Bad lighting could make your art look very bad, no matter how good the sculpt is.

I gathered a lot of references for the lighting, it’s much easier to achieve a more realistic result by using an actual reference than just freestyling and hoping for the best.

For my final step, I used Arnold render to render my images. One drawback I had was that my PC isn’t that powerful; 4K renders would take me days, so I had to drop the resolution to 2K.

Finally, I did a touch-up in Photoshop. And there it was, the finished project.

If you are interested in my work, please follow me as I am creating more fun Characters from Family Guy.

You can follow my progress on:

https://www.artstation.com/guteoka

or

Instagram: @pete_gtk_rabczuk_3d