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Randall Flagg

Being a huge fan of Stephen King I decided to create my version of Randall Flagg, the ubiquitous character appearing in many different times and places, and in King’s own words: the best villain he’s ever written. My version of him is based on his apperance in “The Stand”, and I decided to take some creative freedoms and basing him mostly on the image created in my head while reading the book. Being my first attempt at creating a realistic character, as well as my first time making hair and making clothes using Marvelous Designer, it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot.

The face, hands, boots and belt were sculpted in Zbrush, and retopologized in Maya. I baked them in Marmoset, and then textured them in Substance Painter.

I created a collection of haircards and placed them by hand in Maya. It was a very time consuming process and in some ways I’m not entirely satisfied with the result, but being my first attempt at creating hair I was still pretty happy with the final look.

All pieces of clothing uses their own texture sets since I wanted to make the outfit modular, and have every piece of clothing swappable. The jacket, pants and shirt are using 2k textures for these shots, and the smaller pieces are using 1k textures. For all the fabric I used a tiling detail normal for the fine detail, which makes it very easy to scale down the textures while still maintaining high quality.

All of the shots were rendered with Unreal Engine, and the background assets are from Quixel. I love working in Unreal Engine, and during my time at TGA I’ve learned a lot about the software, creating materials for the skin and the clothing.

The face and the hair was made in 4 weeks half-time, and the body and clothes were made during an additional 3 weeks.

A big thanks to the support of my friends during these three projects:
Fredrik | https://fredrikjh.artstation.com/
Marcus | https://marcuskrol.artstation.com/
Alex | https://www.alexschwandner.com/
And to the wonderful teachers at TGA.

The hair was made by placing hair cards by hand. I first created individual chunks of hair with Xgen, then using Arnold I rendered out the different maps I would be needing.

Using detail normals for the pores of the skin and the fabric of the clothes, I was able to achieve high detail even when using lower resolution textures. Each channel of a RGBA map controls the intensity of the four different detail normals for the face.

Some of the maps for Unreal’s hair-shader  were hard to get directly from Arnold, so I used my renders in combination with Substance Designer to create all the maps I needed.

Some of the maps for Unreal’s hair-shader were hard to get directly from Arnold, so I used my renders in combination with Substance Designer to create all the maps I needed.

Denim Material made in Substance Designer used as a base in the textures for both the jacket and the pants.

Denim Material made in Substance Designer used as a base in the textures for both the jacket and the pants.

I used Marvelous Designer to make the clothes, then finalized them in Zbrush. Being my first time working with Marvelous it was a rough start, but I quickly became familiar with the program and ended up loving to work with it.

I used Marvelous Designer to make the clothes, then finalized them in Zbrush. Being my first time working with Marvelous it was a rough start, but I quickly became familiar with the program and ended up loving to work with it.