This was the full body image. Followed by a quick breakdown of some of the work I put into this piece.
My process followed more of an illustrative approach because the contest window was only a couple of weeks. No where near enough time for me to make a rig-able mesh. For this reason, the character sculpt was rendered in zbrush BPR in several passes. Here's a quick breakdown of those passes I extracted. I should mention that not all of these are used in full. Most of the lighting passes are masked in selectively only where I felt they were needed. Also some of the light was just brushed in afterwards.
Most of the sculpting was pretty straight forward. Make a quick dyna mesh sculpt and then extract body plates and polish. The only thing I did that I felt was probably out of the ordinary was to use the surface noise to produce the fur on the hat and collar. Here's a quick step through of that quick and dirty process.
1. Apply some surface noise to your mesh, this will give the fur a slightly more random direction on the surface. I made myself a custom brush for this a while back. The default Zbrush noise gets to be a bit repetitive. 2. Open your Lightbox from the Noise pallet, just about any pattern will work. 3. Turn down the alpha scale to the point where the pattern isn't really readable. 4. Mask by noise and invert that mask if need be. 5. Inflate to your liking from the Deformation pallet. 6. The final step is to apply a slight blur with the smudge brush in photoshop. This gives the short fur a very soft look, more blur as you go further back in distance helps!
The only thing I sculpted besides the character was the interstate sign in the BG. The rest is a lot of cloud brush and Color Dodge layers. I feel like blending lights and adding painted lighting with Color Dodge does a great job of recreating that 80's light through the smoke look.
So that's basically everything. I'll end with a shot of the plain sculpt. Thanks for stopping by.
Those shorts. Also, I didn't read the title before looking at the first image and the first thing that came to my mind was, "This looks like it could be a Megadeth album cover." So, fucking spot on.
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My process followed more of an illustrative approach because the contest window was only a couple of weeks. No where near enough time for me to make a rig-able mesh. For this reason, the character sculpt was rendered in zbrush BPR in several passes. Here's a quick breakdown of those passes I extracted. I should mention that not all of these are used in full. Most of the lighting passes are masked in selectively only where I felt they were needed. Also some of the light was just brushed in afterwards.
Most of the sculpting was pretty straight forward. Make a quick dyna mesh sculpt and then extract body plates and polish. The only thing I did that I felt was probably out of the ordinary was to use the surface noise to produce the fur on the hat and collar. Here's a quick step through of that quick and dirty process.
1. Apply some surface noise to your mesh, this will give the fur a slightly more random direction on the surface. I made myself a custom brush for this a while back. The default Zbrush noise gets to be a bit repetitive.
2. Open your Lightbox from the Noise pallet, just about any pattern will work.
3. Turn down the alpha scale to the point where the pattern isn't really readable.
4. Mask by noise and invert that mask if need be.
5. Inflate to your liking from the Deformation pallet.
6. The final step is to apply a slight blur with the smudge brush in photoshop. This gives the short fur a very soft look, more blur as you go further back in distance helps!
The only thing I sculpted besides the character was the interstate sign in the BG. The rest is a lot of cloud brush and Color Dodge layers. I feel like blending lights and adding painted lighting with Color Dodge does a great job of recreating that 80's light through the smoke look.
So that's basically everything. I'll end with a shot of the plain sculpt. Thanks for stopping by.
Also, I didn't read the title before looking at the first image and the first thing that came to my mind was, "This looks like it could be a Megadeth album cover." So, fucking spot on.