Conceptually, with this project I wanted to create characters in a way that they together convey a sort of outer world like feel. I think Lord of the rings or any kind of fantasy or science fiction does a great job of making eye catching characters or monster designs that have their own background or character and it inspired me to create my own. For the base I wanted to work with tropes such as the wise wizard, fierce barbarian, or a scoundrel of a rogue and play with them. I chose to give each of them a sort of exoskeleton as a sort of base for the silhouette or thumbnail. Bugs have really pronounced shapes or silhouettes, you would be able to recognize a lady bug from a praying mantis, centipede, or butterfly. In this way it would be easy to distinguish each one from one another if you looked at their body proportions or the head. This helped me in a number of ways, the first is that I created characters that could be from both a fantasy setting and looked alien enough for them to pass off as a part of a science fiction piece. The second thing that helped is the almost bug-like exteriors made them unique in a way that the mixed bone like structure and organic shapes made the creatures not too exotic or out there that they would be unrecognizable. The DND idea is something that really helped me as I wanted really badly to create something that could feel real, in a sense as I wanted to digitally sculpt an object and then 3D print them out. I played a lot of videogames as a kid and that was sort of my escape, so by making these figures I think I got one step closer to my goal of working in the game industry.
- My process began with creating the head of the model in Zbrush, I wanted to create a recognizable shape for the head which I would then use to set the tone for what the figure would look like in the end.
- I then created the figure for the rest of the body, I used a normal base of the human body from reference photos which made it more easier for me to apply my more basic knowledge of the human body.
- Afterwards I masked specific parts of the body so that I would theme be able to manipulate them through the transform tool
- Which is shown here, I remapped the axis of the tool to the specific area in which I would be manipulating the topology and the orientation of the limb.
- I then painted the shadows of the figure after I was done with creating the pose of the figure.
- After working on the main model, I went to work on the added accessories of the figure such as the rocks, weapons and clothing. Appending an object would be inserting the model into the scene which I did for the rest of the objects.
- I then rendered out the figure overall with everything with a BPS shader.
- In the end I think learning Zbrush was way! Easier when it was needed for a class as I think it made me focus on it in a manner that I don’t think would be possible on my own, however Meshmixer helped with giving me some basic tools and definitions to understand
These are some prototypes that I made before I understood how to more comfortably work with Zbrush, I used very crude and somewhat simple shapes.
Final renders of the models that I made, I used rim lighting and a number of other variables with some of the premade renderers that were available in Zbrush
After exporting my models from Zbrush using the tool that Zbrush has for rendering specifically for 3D models, which made the files for the models very compact at I believe under 20mb in size. I then waited for the models sanded some specific areas because the models were so tiny that it became somewhat unwieldy to work with. I also had to glue the models after I painted them, I was happy with how the paint worked, however I made some parts of the coating a little too thick in some areas. Overall I’m happy with the results.