WIP: Infinite Journeys - Earthworm Jim's Interstellar Incursion
So I’ve decided to enter this month’s Infinite Journeys contest hosted by Clint Jones. The theme is “Journey” and my mind immediately pictured Earthworm Jim in a big ship cruising through space, so that’s what I’m going to try to create.
I’ve never created a fully detailed character in ZBrush, at least not one that’s humanoid, and not with detailed articles of clothing, so this is a learning process for me, and if you see me making any mistakes along the way, I welcome your critiques and tips!
I started this project with a basemesh that I modified to fit a character sheet of Jim.
I have a hard time with sculpting hands. Anyhow, here’s a look at one of my janky hands.
After tweaking the hand a bit, I combined it with the body and remeshed it.
Here’s the first test with color.
Looks like Jim, minus the worm part. Nice.
The gloves and straps are real janky, uneven, no clean topology. I learned how to combine extract, zremesher, and panel loops to get decent-looking forms, so I’m remaking the gloves, suspenders, and belt.
The geo is so much cleaner now.
Now I had to figure out suit detailing. So I brushed on a bunch of panel lines, and use polygroupit to create groups from my panel layout ideas. As a test, I masked the group edges and inflated them with a value of -.75.
Those edges need cleanup, but the layout looks nice. I dropped sub d’s, zremeshed with keep groups enabled and cleaned up the topology of my polygroups, re-subbed, then projected the original body onto my newly polygrouped mesh. This gave me clean shapes to then extract and panel loop!
I still have some cleanup to do on some of the polygroups with janky edges that I missed when I did my remeshing, but I was able to extract some clean shapes from this that are ready to have some curves and IMM stitching.
I decided that those panels weren't laid out in a way that I was happy, so I did it again. I also created polygroups on the gloves after sculpting back some of the missing details.
This is where I'm at right now. I'll be continuing the process of extracting geo, cleaning it up, then applying panel loops.
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So here I lay, all the physical cloth panels extracted and cleaned up, for the most part. I'm now sculpting in the wrinkle details. When that's done I can move on to surface texturing! Yay!
The suit is 97% complete! The only thing left to do is give him a belt pouch, then I can move on to either making the render mesh so he can be textured and animated, ORRRR sculpt Jim himself. I’m leaning towards Jim because sculpting is more fun, but we’ll see what happens. Lol
Here's a little update. Been really busy this month blocking out this scene, animating it, and getting it to a state where it's ready to render.
Here is what the comp looks like currently. I've discovered there's a bug with the dangly cables since rendering this image and am working on resolving that issue, but I digress, have a looksee where I've landed.
looking cool keep it up :D
This is looking great! I am excited to see the end result.
This looks fantastic! Man, I really wish they'd make a modern Jim game that looked this good!
I did notice that in the new design of Jim's suit, they added what looks like attachment points for a helmet to the collar and it looks really nice. You may want to integrate that into your own design:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/51b3dc8ee4b051b96ceb10de/6ed22a49-49fd-4313-97e1-aec92537e52d/earthworm-jim-is-getting-an-animated-series-adaptation.jpg
Time for the final video breakdown!
I love it! Do you have a render of the lowpoly? it uh... SURE WOULD BE FUN TO ANIMATE 🙄
I love how you exaggerated the anatomy ^^ he really looks super strong, great work !
Brilliant work on the suit and anatomy.