3d art

98
Making of The
Sky Fishermen
The Sky Fishermen 2008
The Sky Fishermen is a stylistic character model inspired by an
evocative piece of concept art by Christopher ‘Stoph’ Green
Akin Bilgic is a CG/VFX artist
In this tutorial, we’ll
take an in-depth look at
the character modelling
workflow which I used to
create The Sky Fishermen.
Topics covered will include
translating from 2D
concept art, poly modelling
in 3ds Max, digital sculpting
in ZBrush, as well as final
integration and tweaks
using Photoshop.
The creation of The Sky
Fishermen was a big
challenge in my
development as a CG artist,
and I’ll attempt to distil the
successes and errors of the
process so you can learn
from my mistakes and
apply the successful
techniques to your work. If
you have any further
questions after reading this
making-of, I invite you to
contact me through my
website www.cggallery.
com, and I’ll do my best to
answer any questions. I
hope you can use these
steps to create your own
concept characters. Enjoy!
A Stoph’s original
concept art
B A reference image
from iStockphoto
C A quick paintover to
gather my thoughts
Concept
Ideas and reference
01 The concept art
The idea for The Sky Fishermen came from the work of the
amazing concept artist, Christopher ‘Stoph’ Green. I
stumbled upon his art one day while browsing www.
conceptart.org – looking for good concepts to work from
since I’m not much of a 2D artist myself. I immediately fell in
love with this concept and knew I wanted to try re-creating
it in 3D. I contacted Stoph shortly after, asked for his
permission, and he was more than happy to have me take a
crack at it. The underlying concept for The Sky Fishermen is a
story about two boys, Eli and Ardent, who ride the skies on
their flying turtle, Artoise, hunting a menacing species of
flying squid that terrorises their skies.
b
02 Gather reference
One of the most important parts of starting any model is to
take a step back and gather enough reference to help inform
your decisions as an artist. For this project, I gathered as
many sea turtle references as I could get my hands on. I
gathered both real pictures, as well as reference of other
artistic interpretations of sea turtles like the ones done by
Pixar for Finding Nemo. For the boys I gathered reference of
exaggerated children’s facial expressions, and for the hand
poses, pictures of my own hands. Having the right reference
is key to achieving good results.
a
c
03 Plan your approach
Software used in this piece
3ds Max
ZBrush
Photoshop
So now that you’ve got your reference, you might think it’s
time to get modelling! But not just yet. I can’t express how
much time you can save from the whole process if you just
spend a bit of time planning your approach, identifying
potential problems, and thinking of ways to be efficient. For
this project, I saw that I had two children that (aside from a
few pieces of clothing) could be made from the same base
model – and the front and back flippers of the turtle are very
similar so I could probably use an alpha to get them detailed
quickly. Spending an hour to plan your approach can save
you days of unnecessary work later on.