OSTAAD BHEEM SHING

ARTIST

Dhanad Islam SOFTWARE

Maya, Zbrush, Arnold, Substance Painter

3D generalist Dhanad Islam began working on this piece whilst juggling a full-time job, family life and numerous other projects, all in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. He had several goals he wanted to achieve with the character of Ostaad Bheem Shing (Ostaad means captain in Bengali). First, Islam wanted to prepare the character’s base mesh. “This was critical,” he says, “before I began sculpting details I had to do some math which I picked up from Kris Costa’s Digital Portraiture lectures. In order to fully utilise HD Geometry inside Zbrush, I had to layout the UVS in nine UDIMS. The goal was to render out 8K 32-bit displacement maps to capture all the high-frequency details and high-definition albedo maps.” Using Zbrush’s HD Geometry in conjunction with Costa’s maths proved a revelation for Islam, allowing him to achieve a subdivision of 145 million polygons on the character’s body with no viewport lag and ensure all the details were at optimum resolution.

Among Islam’s other achievements were the use of Zbrush’s Dynamics functions to drive cloth simulation before manually sculpting the details. He also used Xgen’s interactive grooming toolset, built into Maya, to sculpt the character’s hair in layers. Finally, Islam utilised Maya’s MASH network tool to replicate and simulate the gold coins, manually tweaking them for better composition.