Wanted to make my own version of an ancient bust of Aspasia, who was once upon a time busy doing... er... lots of stuff in ancient greece. Among other things, she was apparently married to Pericles at some point. Aspasia herself that is, not the bust...

Anyway - I found a photo of the original marble piece while browsing wikipedia a few days ago, and decided to give it ago. Unfortunately I was not quite capable of capturing the elusive beauty of the original, but I'm pretty satisfied with the final result none the less.

Technically, I roughed out a simple base mesh in C4D (around 1000 quads) and brought that into MudBox. Spent two days on and off merrily sculpting away, then extracted a 6144 x 2048 displacement map from the final 3.5 million poly sculpt, brought everything back into Cinema and painted a colour map in BodyPaint. The final lighting was a fairly simple setup with three fill omnis, one additional omni for some rim lighting, and a rather large rectangular arealight with areashadows for the key light.



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