Behind the Scenes: Nurse

INTRODUCTION

My name is Pavlo, and I am a self-taught artist from Ukraine. I work as a freelancer, creating models for 3D printing, but I also have a hobby—creating beautiful (if possible) renders in Blender 3D.

INSPIRATION

Sometimes I feel inspired to model dark, creepy, or even disgusting art. Recently, I played Baldur's Gate 3 and saw beautiful nurses in one location.

I really liked that the top of her face was hidden. I immediately knew that this would be a good inspiration. I also really like the style of the artist, Steffen Hartmann. You can find his page on ArtStation through this link:

The nurse with Steffen's style came together in my head, and I came up with the image of a nasty nurse with a manic smile and a syringe. I quickly found a reference for such a syringe, and got to work.

PROCESS

Below is the process of the artwork, including system specifications, modelling, texturing, lighting, and rendering.

System Specifications

Hardware:

• CPU- Ryzen 7-5700x
• RAM- 32GB
• GPU- RTX 3080 12gb

Software:

Blender only. Yes, it might not seem so, but I did everything in Blender, even texturing!

Modelling

I began with two references and a clear idea. For the head and hand, I used the free Human Base Meshes from Blender Studio as a base.

Once I came up with the composition, I set up the camera and began sculpting using multi-resolution.

Then I started sculpting and adding some details to the model.

To create the relief of the skin, I used different textures for folds and pores.

Making clothes is just polygonal modelling and multi-resolution sculpting, except for the fabric that hangs over the eyes—I made it using cloth physics. Here is the fully finished model:

Texturing

For the fabric, I did not use anything unusual. The materials are from the BlenderKit add-on. I added dirt, something red (blood) with the help of texture masks to make the fabric not look boring. I also added seams following this tutorial from Andrew Price:

If you look closely, you can see the texture seams. But this is not a problem because the seams are not visible in the render :)

The textures of the face and hand were completely made in Blender. Using various grunge textures as a mask for the brush, I tried to make the skin look rough, with blues, purples, and reddish undertones.

This is what skin with a diffuse texture looks like.

With normal maps (baked from multi-resolution) and some texture color correction, it looked creepy :)

I also drew a very simple roughness map to make the lips shine a little more. The face and hand shaders are similar and look pretty simple.

The syringe was not a problem—it's a fairly simple model, almost entirely made of primitives and featuring a slightly rusty iron and glass material.

A view of all the parts from the camera. In the final stages, I decided to add some hair.

Lighting

I used a few back-lights and a few fill-lights, nothing out of the ordinary.

As for the key-lights (there are two), I set the spread setting to 33 degrees to make the light more directional. I aimed them at the face and hand to highlight them.

Above are the settings for the key-light on the face.

RENDER - Nurse

Thank you for reading the article. Feel free to explore more of my work on my social media accounts. Have a great day!

About the Artist                       

Pavlo is an artist from Ukraine who models and renders various things as a hobby.