3D Character Fanart: Hans Landa from Inglourious Basterds

In a list containing the best villains ever written, I think this man deserves a spot somewhere high in that list. The more physical and flashy superpowers like flight, energy beam, super speed and all that are fun, but I love it the most when a character's power is his/her knowledge alone and they use it well that they become formidable.

But that's about fictional characters in general, I'm aware that Inglourious Basterds is set in 1940s France, not in space in 2019 with a lot of spaceships and some purple guy looking to complete his pretty stones collection.

“I love rumors! Facts can be so misleading, where rumors, true or false, are often revealing.”

-Col. Hans Landa

Anyway, this is another part of the WIP scene that I'm working on. This time I'm going to give you a little peek on how I made this stylized version of Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa in the movie Inglourious Basterds.

I gathered a couple of references from the movie itself, just like last time. However, instead of starting from scratch, I 'recycled' Aldo's hi-poly face and started to sculpt Hans Landa's from there. Gotta work as efficient as possible, right?

^{First iteration, neutral face.}

I think it was a better decision rather than keep getting things wrong after spending some time re-adjusting the shape of the face and the facial features around, because I found it better to 'refresh' the look to determine the facial features' shapes, positions, sizes, etc.

^{Second iteration. Looks kinda creepy.}

Since this is going to be a one-time render, I decided to try to create him in an already smiling expression rather than making him smile by setting up shapekeys later. Or by telling him a joke or something. But his face turned out kinda crappy and I decided to just hide the teeth.

I'm trying to keep it non-3D artist-friendly to read but sometimes there are some 3D terms that have to be written, such as shapekeys, which is the method to change his facial expression. Or at least that's the easiest way to put it.

^{Third iteration. Me likey.}

The feature that I tried to get right the most is the shape of his smile, while keeping everything far enough from being realistic. Like the eyes for example, if I make them smaller everything look a lot less stylized, but still keeping them from being so anime-big. That, and his square chin.

I can say that I learnt a little about reading facial features from doing this project.

If I'm being honest, Cristoph Waltz's strong, boxy chin looks like it is stylized, and reminds me a lot of the Crimson Chin from Fairly Odd Parents.

Forget what I said about learning to 'read' facial features... I think I'll take that back.

^{The final sculpt.}

^{Modelling and texturing stage.}

Modelling those little badges are easy as some of them were quite simple box-modelling, but still took some time. I also ended up Googling up some of the badges and read about them to get them right.

^{The lighted model on the left might be easier for the eyes to see than those nonsense on the right.}

I think I could have done better with this one, especially on the texturing part, which made it look like the textured low-poly model looks less like the actor than the high-poly sculpture. Maybe I will fix a couple of things, but not gonna go back to square one or two. I'll keep some of the mistakes in my artworks as lessons.

^{The final render, as shown above.}

Now I'm still doing some fixes on the final scene, on Aldo's model, and trying to come up with a good idea of how to make the final scene looks interesting. What this 'scene' I keep talking about? Well, I guess you know which scene if you've watched the movie before.

I'll put the link of the resources downloaded to complete the appearance of this model down below. Thank you for visiting, and don't forget to...