First off, I grabbed a bunch of reference photos. Tons of them. I mean, I went crazy searching online, looking for those perfect angles. Needed to see how his arms looked from every direction, you know? The way the muscles flexed, how the joints moved... It was a serious deep dive.
Then, I started with a base model. I’m pretty comfortable with Blender, so I just whipped up a basic humanoid rig. It was… basic. Like, really basic. Think stick figure, but slightly less stick-like. Got the proportions mostly right, at least I think I did. It's hard to say, honestly. Getting that length right was a nightmare. D-Wade's got those crazy long arms.
After t.sliatedhat, the sculpting began. This is where things got messy. Hours and hours spent sculpting. Seriously, I lost track of time. I was adding and subtracting, smoothing and tweaking. Little bits here, little bits there. Trying to get that specific musculature right. It’s a lot harder than you think! His shoulders are broad, his forearms are… well, they're powerful. I was constantly checking back with my reference pictures, zooming in on details.
Texturing was next, which was fun, relatively speaking. I found some decent skin textures online, tweaked them a bit to get the right tones. Then I had to get creative with the clothes, since I didn't have any actual high-res scans of his jerseys. Luckily, my skills are decent enough to get something close, and I even added some subtle wrinkles and creases to make it look more realistic.
Lighting was probably the easiest part. I just used a three-point lighting setup. Simple, effective. Got that nice soft lighting on his face, and then a bit of backlighting to bring out his shape.
The rigging, though? Ugh. That took forever. Getting the arm movements smooth and natural was the hardest thing. I spent ages adjusting weights and tweaking things, trying to get rid of those weird little pops and glitches. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough for a personal project. I’m not making an AAA game here!
And finally, rendering. I rendered it out at a decent resolution, took a while. But when it was done… I was pretty proud of myself, actually. It didn't look exactly like Dwyane Wade, obviously, but it was a decent likeness. I think he’d probably get a chuckle out of it, anyway. It was a good learning experience. I learned a ton about human anatomy, and I definitely improved my sculpting skills. Maybe next time I'll try someone a bit less… intense to sculpt.
