Our old lady started out as a 3D Scan Store morphable base mesh (young), which we intended to combine with a 3D Scan Store HD head (elderly). Proportions for the body were defined in ZBrush and exported for wrapping in R3DS Wrap. We then took the HD head and wrapped it on top of the original head of the base mesh, which was too young, although now emaciated. Afterwards, we imported an unmodified version of the HD head and matched the wrapped head’s neckline position using a combination of vertex grouping, shrink-wrapping, and shapekeys to restore the facial features of the elderly HD head.

We chose to connect the two meshes rather than leave them separate because of rigging considerations, as we wanted to have not only a full-body rig, but also a separate rig for the FACS facial expressions. The head was further sculpted in Blender to match reference, and the body then underwent a final pass of sculpting tertiary details such as veins and other signs of aging.

The rigging of the body consisted of manually placed reference bones using Auto-Rig Pro, from which we generated the IK/FK skeleton and controllers. Weight painting was done using Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning and touched up manually where the deformations needed refinement.

The facial rig was created using FaceIt, which involved creating guides for the main facial landmarks and then manually adjusting the shapekeys for each of the FACS expressions using Blender’s sculpting tools.

Hair grooming was done using Blender’s curve groom tools.

Clothing was simulated in Marvelous Designer and exported as an alembic sequence for shading and lookdev in Blender.

EmberGen was used to create the hero VDB, using the lady’s body as an emitter.

Given the resolution of the final image and the memory requirements of the entire scene, we chose to use a render farm for the final output.

Post-processing was done using Photoshop.