Stranger Things - Digital doubles

I was responsible for shading the 3 digital doubles for the characters cursed by Vecna in Stranger Things (Season 4). The goal was to create highly accurate digital replicas of the actors, paying particular attention to body parts that would snap or break (like legs, arms, and fingers) and the eerie effect of eyes being sucked into their sockets. We built a precise lighting rig that mirrored the conditions used for the actors' photogrammetry captures, ensuring the digital doubles were lit as closely as possible to the original references.

For the skin, I recommended using XYZ textures to save time in modeling, especially given the large number of creatures and digital doubles we had to process. These high-detail textures allowed us to achieve realistic specular reflections and subsurface behaviour. I still had to make use of a lot of masks to drive the intensity of the texture in the different areas of the face to get closer to the reference image.

Chrissy, the first and main character shown under the curse and one of the closest to the camera, required extra attention to her likeness. One significant challenge was the lack of Macbeth color charts, making it difficult to confirm the accuracy of our photo reference's white balance and colors. We ran extensive lighting tests to ensure we got the color balance right. Her hair also posed a challenge, as achieving the correct specular reflections required some fine-tuning by the groom artist. Hair roughness is often more dependent on how strands clump together than on individual hairs shading, which led to a lot of back-and-forth adjustments.

I relied heavily on masks to achieve the desired shading variation for both hair and skin. As production ramped up, I started creating these masks myself in Substance Painter to speed up turnaround times.

I'm very pleased with how Chrissy's close-up shots turned out.