FMP - Week 10

 

Starting this week off in ZBrush, I was back sculpting away on Judgement, my monster character. Having started the previous week on the torso, I continued refining some of the shapes and trying to get a well balanced sense for the proportions. I knew I had to push the proportions to make his body more exaggerated and stylised but it was finding that perfect midway point between good and bad exaggeration that was the tricky part.

His torso was the only ‘fleshy’ portion to the monster since his head was essentially armour and his tail is just a magical wisp. Getting this section of the model right was crucial to unify the whole thing together. It would be painfully obvious if I looked off.

I played around with scale mainly when it came to the proportions. Things like the size of the shoulder muscles, the skinniness to the waist, the length of the arms were the areas I felt I could alter best to look more interesting. I also took to paying close attention to the reference I’d gathered to see how others had created shapes that read well in a monster form.

Aside from that though, once I had the base shape I knew I wanted, I exported the torso to 3DSMax and started working on the hard surface features. The head and the spine were the main features that I had to carefully figure out how to model to get the shape I wanted whilst keeping in mind topology. The head in particular I constructed quite carefully since I wanted to have the mouth open so I had to be considerate of the teeth. The process as a whole wasn’t necessarily challenging but it took me approaching I slowly in order to get the shapes right and not distort them accidentally.

 

Once I’d completed all the hard surface assets though I imported them all back into ZBrush where I gave another detail pass on top of them (and the torso). Additionally I added the tail. However, when it came to the tail I wasn’t fully sure how to approach creating it because I hadn’t yet decided how I wanted to present it. Whether it should be a whole, fully textured portion to the monster or something like a translucent alpha, etc. I also had to keep in mind rigging in the future. For the time being though I implemented a tail that was there mainly for me to get a sense of the scale of the character as a whole and potentially give me better judgement as to how to approach making the tail in future.