Composer Portraits in Relief

ZBrush, Mental Ray for Maya, Photoshop, Marmoset Toolbag (2012-2016)

My first job out of college had me tackling a problem that I’d never even considered and at a time when I was still learning to sculpt. The result was a sculpting style heavily influenced by underlying forms which proved critical in capturing these portraits.

All of these portraits feature key musical composers from throughout history. The digital sculpts were 3D printed, used to make molds, and then cast in glass. My client’s style featured additional text and texture for those purposes which are not present in my renders.

Because of how barren the information landscape was when I began these, I’ve since taken copious notes about the process which have, surprisingly, drawn a lot of traffic from artists around the world who have taken on the same challenges. Below is a brief summary of the journey.

Early Attempts - Flattening

My first attempts at making relief portraits were complex and convoluted. I was still picking up the basics of portrait sculpting in full depth and was in no way prepared to sculpt straight in relief. My solution, then, was to sculpt each composer in full 3D, choose a composition, and flatten it back down again. This method got be through Verdi, Schubert, Stravinsky, Beethoven, and Bach.

This approach was useful to me as a modeler learning to sculpt but was not ideal once sculpting became my dominant skill. While using a full bust allowed me to choose any composition I wanted, it also meant I’d spent a lot of time on hidden parts of the model, then more time trimming them away in preparation for the flattening. What’s more, these portraits didn’t sit flush with the flat plane they needed to project out of such that I had to skew everything back with lattices in Maya. Last, and most important, was the discovery that relief sculpture makes use of artificial depths to trick the eye into seeing what’s important while hiding what isn’t.

Later Attempts - Direct Sculpting

Eventually I changed methods to one that I could repeat more readily and control from the start. I began with a special cylinder mesh that featured extremely low poly count on one side and extremely high count on the other. This allowed me to subdivide the mesh while keeping >90% of the verts on the sculpted side. I used a second copy of this mesh as a permanent back plate so that the portrait could dive through the surface at sharper angles without so much edge cleaning. Keeping these crisp edges saved time and lent personality to the outer masses, particularly in the boxiness of the shoulders.

By this time I’d worked out a basic formula for presenting facial forms in relief. The first and largest form to capture was the box of the head. This box can only have to faces visible at a time, with each outer edge resting on the back plate. The cheekbones closest to our view represent the center edge which should be as distinct as possible.

The second major observation that I held tight to was the necessity of protecting what I called “real depth” around the eyes, nose, and mouth as much as possible. The nose in particular forms a fin which directs the entire box of the head like the mast of a ship. In many cases it even overhangs the face behind it. Our eyes are quick to read that detail making it really difficult to convincingly flatten the face in that area. Similarly, the eye sockets need to be deep enough to create roundness in the eyes protruding from them. Strangely, the relative depth of those sockets to one another was less important since so much of the face’s actual depth has already been lost. Your nose, for example, really only represents a small fraction of the length of your skull, yet in relief I made it nearly half.

A third element was the falloff of edges. When depth is reduced and hidden from our senses, it’s crucial that we disguise the absence so that our eyes don’t register it. The blockiness or softness of an edge as it rolls into other forms or into the back plate gives its own impression of depth. Notice how sharply and thickly the far cheeks jut back out of view. Then note how softly the long stretch of the closer cheeks runs back, passing along the ear and back of the head until it finally blends into the back plate. Adding enough thickness to the shoulders creates the familiar top plane that we expect to see there and is done with the same sharp falloff. The chin offers the same.

Hard Bits - Hair

In every relief there are a few challenges that stand our more than others. If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably also noticed how diverse and complex these composers’ hair styles were. Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Verdi had majestic full beards. Bach had fancy wig rolls. Felix, Schubert, and Beethoven had imaginary glorified snake curls. Fanny had a whole bouquet up there. Every time I got a new commission, the first thing I checked and the first thing I dreaded was inevitably the hair. Even after I started sculpting directly in relief, hair took copious amounts of time and patience.

Stand back from your work and think about the actual amount of texture you’ll need to convey the hair. You won’t need every strand, just some of the important ones to get things started.

Create the forms of the hair first, then fill in larger shapes. If things start to look ridiculous, save your work and return to an older save to try something different.

Start soft with your shaping. Don’t dig things way into the surface until you’re sure it’s what you want.

Hard Bits - Beards

Even beards have layers, more so in relief than in life. I chose to focus a lot on the overlap of the mustache over and around the cheeks. Short hair might look more like a repeating pattern of texture (check the upper cheeks of Tchaikovsky) while long hair creates actual flowing forms. Dvorak also featured the prickly underside of a chin—rather than wrapping hair all the way down that form, stop and transition into foreshortened spikes.

Hard Bits - A Hat

Puccini’s portrait features a hat. I wouldn’t recommend this but it is possible. The obvious shortcoming of hats is that they rely on broad flat planes that cross all the way from the back of the head to the front. Since those depths are faked and squashed, the hat’s planes will also be rather warped. In my solution, you can see the pinching of depth at either side of the portrait where the hat suddenly juts back to its farthest reaches. The bizarre thing is that you can see the hat behind a person’s head, even those there is no such space provided in relief.

Hard Bits - Glasses

Schubert and Stravinsky both wear glasses. These, like the hat, cross through multiple depths and hang out in space over other details. On a flat relief they may be pretty straight forward but the farther the relief stretches out into space, the more the glasses need to hand in space. Needing to 3D print the portraits meant that I couldn’t literally hang the frames in space so I instead extruded them straight back into the head. I tried my best to wrap them convincingly around the face, eventually ending up with a result that was only really awkward when viewed from the side. In hindsight, I could have etched a frame into these planes and created a slight cavity there to hide that part. I used a separate mesh for the glasses during sculpting.

Hard Bits - Composing

My first portraits allowed me to choose a composition freely. Unfortunately, my references didn’t provide much inspiration for the unseen portions of the head. My client generally chose the original pose anyway, which made the advantage practically non existent.

The other huge problem with using multiple references for historical figures (unless you’re pretty good at making your own interpretations of faces) is that your references likely have divergent styles. Paintings done by artists who may not even have seen the subject vary widely. Sometimes the most accurate renditions are the least details or useful. Blending paintings with etchings from throughout a figure’s lifetime and beyond is a recipe for competing details.

I distinctly remember having to produce a portrait of Felix Mendelssohn using an unconvincing and unsettling engraving done by an artist years after Mendelssohn had died rather than a painting done during his lifetime (and that after I’d completed a full bust using the better reference). Fanny Mendelssohn’s portrait was based on a sketch done by her husband, one with limited details and clearly perfected features. That one I loved doing.

Stravinsky’s initial bust had two versions: one young and one old. I had stored those details on a layer so that I could change between them at will.

Bartok gave me a unique challenge in that my client had chosen a photo in which the subject was leaning forward. This placed the shoulders even farther back from the rest of the portrait, a perspective that didn’t quite work when you zoomed all the way in on it. I might have anticipated the problem and adjusted the posture of the pose to be more practical. The result gave him a larger face with less appealing side views.

Hard Bit - Eyes

If the eyes are wrong, you’ll know. I’m sorry to say there’s no better way to get them right than to admit when they’re wrong.

The sphere of the eye is flattened, creating a similar box to the skull itself. Unfortunately, if you try to use those boxes to create perpendicular facing planes to rest your pupils on, you’ll quickly find that those planes aren’t really facing the same direction due to one side being foreshortened while the other is elongated. That change in plane will be visible due to the way light casts itself on the surface of the relief, so it’s best to force these planes to be closer together, once again using fakery to trick the eye. I relied heavily on the shadows and lighting of the eyes to determine their depth and planes.

The actual design of the pupil and iris is up to you. I tried several different approaches. Verdi only has a single depression. Schubert and Stravinsky have no depressions, only a slight bulge as the actual surface of an eye might have (they both had glasses though). The next few portraits had a raised pupil to which I added a fake specular highlight for Fanny. Dvorak attempted a double depression, again matching the eye behind the cornea, with a highlight over it. Later portraits seem to return to the previous design. Though imperceptible in the physical casts, the raised pupils created their own planes which also needed to match one another just as the eyes themselves needed to match.