Portrait with Waves — ZBrush Sculpt | Anna Schmelzer

Portrait with Waves is my personal project and the piece that defines this portfolio. I sculpted a hyperrealistic female portrait entirely in ZBrush, with flowing wave-form hair built through mesh boolean operations and ZBrush's dynamic subdivision workflow. I rendered it in Blender Cycles with a custom HDRI setup to bring out the translucency of the skin shader and the reflective complexity of the hair geometry.

The piece received ZBrush Top Row in 2021 — the highest recognition the ZBrush community gives to a single artwork — and was inducted into the CG Society Hall of Fame at the same time. It appeared in the November 2021 print edition of 3D World Magazine.

For the hair, I avoided conventional simulation or particle systems. The wave forms are sculpted geometry — each strand and flow modelled by hand in ZBrush, then refined with DynaMesh and ZRemesher for clean, render-ready topology. That gave me full control over silhouette and volume in a way procedural hair cannot.

I built the skin shader in Blender Cycles using a multi-layer SSS setup, with separate scattering radii for the epidermal, dermal and subdermal layers. Pore and micro-surface detail was hand-sculpted at the highest subdivision level and baked into a displacement map for rendering.

I later processed the still sculpt through Kling AI to produce a 4-second loop — gentle hair movement and a slight eye shift — for portfolio presentation.