How to Sculpt Zagreus from Hades in 3D

Introduction 

Hello, I'm Alex Gray! I am a 3D character and concept artist specializing in games, animation, and printable sculptures. Sculpting characters has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. For several years, I worked as an architect, creating concepts and designs for buildings and interiors, which was aligned with my education. However, over time, I realized that I could find more fulfillment and creativity in the game development and animation industries, with characters being my true passion.

What excites me most about this field is the ability to blend storytelling with art, bringing characters to life in ways that resonate with people. The process of crafting unique personalities through design continues to be both a challenge and a joy. Interestingly, my architectural background has been invaluable in shaping my artistic skills. It strengthened my understanding of design principles, composition, color theory, and 3D software, which I now apply to character design. I’ve worked on a variety of original character projects for different artists, collaborated with print studios, and participated in many competitions, for example from ArtStation (Medieval: Back and Forth 3D place, Dragon's Rise: The Forgotten Realms Lightbox Expo: Box of Mystery), and sometimes made fan art just for fun. One of my most recent major projects was creating several characters for the Necromantic project at Blinkmoon Games.

Zagreus

In general, I adore the game Hades, with its cool caricature characters (in a good way) and just stunning design (awesome work of light and shadow, excellent visual solutions, and exciting combat, which, like a drug, lures you to come back to the game again and again).

I played it to death at the time and even killed Hades 10 times for the right ending. Also, I romanced Meg, an incredible mistress. Well, of course, my portfolio with many outstanding ladies probably speaks about who I would romance for itself. Actually, I'm lying, there are a couple of hot men there too! But long story short, I really liked Zagreus! He is an awesome pumped-up guy with a six-pack, beads of sweat running down his neck, and a wonderful sparkling sense of humor. He's kind and caring, a man of a truly generous soul – just a real God and an example to follow, isn't he? And when Bulkmancer asked me to sculpt Zagreus, I agreed, how could I not to such a cool and hot guy? It was a hit right into the heart.

To begin with, it was necessary to select a pack of references.

It was necessary to decide on the pose and its compositional connection with the base, there were its own questions and torments about the future printed figure. I did not want to repeat myself too much with the already existing figures and therefore wanted to do something special.

At first, I planned to make some kind of super dynamic pose, where Zagreus would fly towards the enemy in the heat of battle with one of the legendary weapons in his hands. However, in the case of Zagreus (relative to his design from the game, volumes, style, and plasticity of his body and clothes), his figure in dynamics was a little blurry for my taste, the composition of his figure in motion began to work almost only for one angle, and at other angles parts of the body stuck together, the character ceased to be recognizable. 

I created poses using the TPoseMaster plugin in the ZBrush. We mask the necessary body parts and pose, both the standard ZBrush gizmo and the ruler to help.

Static versions of the composition seemed more interesting to me, they worked for a larger number of viewing angles, and the static pose evoked better and more familiar associations to the viewer (one of such poses was on most covers, advertisements, and splash screens for the first part of the game).

The option of tying the figure of Zagreus with some volume of a monster that he would defeat or on which he would stand was also there, however, in this case, the viewer's attention and composition would be greatly scattered and defocused from our sparkling boy to the big monster under his feet (at least, I saw this in some existing examples).

In the end, I decided to make his classic iconic pose, but turned and cartoonishly pointed more in the gamedev style. In this version I tried to exaggerate his pose, bend it even more, sharper, more playful, more in character, and also to get closer to the gamedev style with sharp/clear edges and sharp lines and an abundance of competent thicknesses. Naturally, I tried to tie the character to the base lore-wise, since Zagreus is the god of blood, the idea was to make the base in the form of a stand with a pool of blood, from which bloody hands crawl out (just like in the game), here and there including Greek motifs of patterns.

You can also see a concept overpaint where I finished the overall composition, where I made the hands themselves more silhouetted, visible, and at the same time like regular streams of blood flowing down, just like Greek meanders.

Modeling

Obviously, I started modeling the figure with blocking, first making the character in an A-pose. For a specific style with sharp, clear edges, I modeled clothes and accessories with ZModeler, this method was more suitable for the style of the game – pure sculpting would not have worked here unless you were just pulling out the folds with it at the final stages.

In ZModeler, I work with Move and Move Topology brushes. In order to work this way, it is certainly necessary to understand all the functionality of Zmodeler, which many artists neglect for no good reason, polygonal modeling is just as important as sculpting. When the mesh and body/clothing proportions are in the state we need, we assign polygroups, this will be useful to us in the future. Some people will say, “Why do you bother so much, you are not making a game-ready model this time, why low poly? Make a sculpt, and that's it!” Perhaps these people are right, but I am comfortable when the mesh is relatively adequate, and in the future, it is easier to “pull out” all the elements we need from it, especially if we are talking about the Hades style.

I also did the hair using the RenHair brush and low-poly modeling (again working with ZModeler), the main thing was to maintain the rhythm and direction of his main front curls, which greatly set the character's recognizability.

However, I created the body itself based on the base mesh (without blocking), sculpting muscles and stylization, changing proportions, and pulling it up relative to the concept, sometimes working with the transparency mode of the software over my concept to catch the general flow of the pose.

Then we work with the Move and Move Topology brushes to give the figure characteristic proportions from the reference, and since we have everything in polygroups, it is very convenient to select the desired part of the body and mask it via CTRL + LMB, scale, move, etc. Below you will also see several iterations of working out the entire figure and pose, where you can see how the proportions of the legs and shoulders change, and the division of clothing becomes more complex (with the addition of new inserts to fix the edges).

Sometimes I also use crease edges for sharp edges, but I still prefer to use the addition of inserts since, with their approach and distance, I can better control the softness of the edges as I need. But creases will not be seen by, for example, Marmoset Toolbag, and all your edges will look like soap, so fixing edges is our everything.

Also, work with sculpting was required on such elements as the dog and human skulls. For them, of course, I already created a base mesh from low poly for basic volumes, but then it was necessary to work directly with brushes.

The likeness also didn't work out the first time. I wanted to keep his sharp facial style from the game (with pointed eyelashes) and add my own style, but at the same time make him a pretty handsome young god. An asymmetrical male smile can be a challenge, but a little perseverance, a couple of references, and a mirror with your own facial expressions will do the trick and will always help you.

Coloring

From the very beginning, from blocking, I try to sketch the main basic colors on the objects, this helps me better navigate the proportions and dynamics during work, although sometimes I still try to switch the figure to grayscale mode and see where the mistakes and irregularities are.

I wanted to achieve the effect of the drawn shadows from the game not by hand-painting but rather by the play of light and shadow, which naturally lay down with sharp edges with such gamedev sculpting. Of course, there were options to make, for example, colored contrasting shadows (for my taste, they lay down more harmoniously on the 3D style, unlike pure black ones, more and more such curious examples of live painting began to appear on the internet), but for specific purposes such color-conceptual elaboration was excessive. Also, a colored outline was added, which was achieved by adjusting the material.

Rendering

A few words about the render: I usually render and set up materials in Marmoset Toolbag, but this time, I wanted to maintain a more cartoonish 2D style, so I set up Zagreus' render in ZBrush, I made a screenshot from ZBrush with the materials directly from the viewport. 

True, Bulkmanser made their own render in Blender with subsequent post-processing, but such a render looked more like a realistic figurine, and I didn’t want to copy their render style.

Conclusion

My advice to beginning artists is just to practice; "the eyes are afraid, but the hands do the work." do what you love, and you will definitely succeed.

Alex Gray, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine