Pretty lady picture (Fully rigged 3D character, Unreal 5).

Oleg Koreyba is Making Faces

A Comprehensive Study of Human Expression and the Art of Portraiture

I have been told more than once that my face is particularly loud. To be a little more specific, I apparently show what I’m thinking clearly and quickly in my expressions. I don’t really think of it as a problem, but I sometimes wonder how people that don’t know me well will interpret what they see. In much the same way, an audience’s reception of a character has a lot to do with how they receive the content they are viewing. Realism or otherwise, a character needs to be compelling.

I believe what that drooping eyelid is doing is called “Ptosis.” (Baron’s head, Game model).

Oleg Koreyba is an industry veteran with decades of experience and expertise in an expansive toolbelt of design and modeling programs. He’s immensely skilled in creating 2d and 3d portraits, as well as other varieties of 3d-asset creation, such as PBR materials and photogrammetry. He lists his specializations as, “Character modeling and texturing for video games, films, and holography,” as well as, “Digital sculpting for 3D printing and CNC carving.” His resume is dense enough that it’s hard to do it justice.

I can’t stress enough that Koreyba has tons of really incredible portraits in his portfolio. The model of Baron from Metro Exodus (also embedded above) shows a variety of expressions, and it was hard for me to narrow it down to which ones I wanted to include in the article. We communicate so much with expressions and we wear some of our history in our face, so I very much enjoy seeing art that reflects that. This video of a lovely lady rendered in Unreal Engine 5 shows a good spread of emotions that are communicated clearly. I think that how well a face communicates is a huge part of what makes them “compelling.”

Is this tree dead or olive? (Ancient olive Tree #2 Two thousand years old).

I also took interest in these 3d scans of an ancient olive tree (here and here). They caught my eye immediately, and I felt I needed to include more than one kind of lighting. I wanted to show off how phenomenally the end product captured all of the intricate grooves of this storied, two-thousand-year-old tree. Koreyba has a variety of other tree scans as well, with many of the models and scans for sale.

Sometimes it feels like…(Realtime Eyes in the Metro Exodus game).

This week, I’m struggling. I’ve been trying my hand at painting in color instead of black and white, and it’s like throwing darts at a board that’s underwater and halfway down the street, during a windstorm. Even if the end product turns out in a way I like, I can’t seem to get a grasp of a workflow that works every time. I’m in the weeds. I’m off the edge. I’m out of control.

Whether my face is being loud about that is beyond me, though.

How my painting looks in my head vs. How it’s going (Head sculpt in Zbrush, fully rigged 3D character, Unreal 5 to Metahuman).

Check Koreyba on Artstation!

Or, browse his website or LinkedIn!