Tide of Solitude

This is my personal project, which I submitted for the Best of Term Fall '24 and won the category for Lighting and Rendering. I sculpted the character in ZBrush, textured it in Substance Painter, and rendered it using Path Tracer in UE5. The themes of mortality, grief, and old age inspired this 3D render. As I did not have direct concept art for this piece, I had definitive elements that felt promising and cohesive for the final image. I decided to focus on an old sailor, a character embodying the physical toll of age and the resilience against it. 

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One of the most ambitious aspects of this piece was sculpting the face of an older person, a challenge I had never fully tackled before. It was by far the most difficult portrait I’ve worked on. To make the face more believable, I frequently sought feedback from peers, refining features and proportions based on their insights. This process deepened my understanding of anatomy and facial structure.