Modeling and Texturing a Funny Sculpt of a Man and a Cute Anglerfish

Introduction

My name is Kevin Beckers. I started my professional career in product visualization and architectural interior visualization in Amsterdam. While doing that, I discovered ZBrush and found that I enjoyed creating characters way more than creating packaging images for Philips and Miele, so in the evening hours after work, I would practice creating characters.

After a few years of that, posting work on CGHub, people started reaching out for freelance projects, enough to eventually be able to quit my day job and pursue freelance character work full-time. I have worked for a lot of different companies, such as Wooga Berlin, Colorbleed Utrecht, Axis Glasgow, Guerrilla Games Amsterdam, etc.

Ol' Jenkins and Martha

So I've always been a massive fan of Creature Box, Lost Bear Studios, and the whole Ratchet and Clank art style. This is my 5th piece based on their work. I was looking for some new project to work on, something relatively straightforward (not much grooming work, not much R&D). And browsing through Creature Box's Instagram, as I do, I came across that image, and it clicked.

There was a story in that image, and not just a cool-looking image of a character. They have a real knack for that. So, combine that with Martha looking so happy and cute (especially for an anglerfish!), and Ol' Jenkins looking the way he did, plus the color scheme. I was hoping to capture the spirit of that image, and also just have a bit of fun.

Modeling

I started, as always, with a sphere in ZBrush. There is really nothing special about the modeling/sculpting. First, sculpting the body, using the extract tool to create clothes, and some ZModeler for the hat. Sculpted Ol' Jenkins first, making sure to have the reference off-screen always and really trying to capture his personality, and trying to maintain the shapes, the thick lower arms, the strong hands. He's skinny, but strong-looking. He looks like someone who hasn't sat behind a screen holding a Wacom stylus for most of his career.

Topology

Retopo was done in 3ds Max. I do all my modeling and retopo in 3ds Max. Every time I try something like TopoGun, I get frustrated because I don't instantly know where a tool/feature is, and run back to my familiar, comfortable 3ds Max.

For the unwrapping, I have taken up RizomUV for the past few years, unlike TopoGun, which one did stick, because it is so obviously superior to 3ds Max's unwrapping tools. Using the 3ds Max to RizomUV bridge feature, it starts up just as fast as 3ds Max's native unwrap tool (if not faster), and it is so much faster than 3ds Max or Maya's unwrapping tools, especially with heavy models.

Texturing

I use Substance 3D Painter for my texturing work. I considered using 3D Coat for this project, but I opted to stick with Substance 3D Painter because I didn't have to go too crazy with the hand-painting. The biggest challenge in the texturing was to "plus" especially Martha compared to the concept, adding a bit of a metallic sheen to her, playing with the colors without losing the spirit of the concept.

Also, figuring out a nice transition between her white skin and the purple fins in an interesting way took a few iterations. Other than that, I just made sure to look at the concept and copy what I saw there.

Main Challenges

So I recently gave up my V-Ray license. I've always been a V-Ray user, but I’ve been playing around with Marmoset Toolbag. And while it's not as flexible as Vray, it is incredibly fast, and it gives pretty good results. So, apart from some technical hiccups and a little learning curve, I had to deal with coming from V-Ray to Marmoset Toolbag.

Finding a fun way to present the image was a bit of a challenge. The concept was, of course, just a close-up of the two, and I wanted to show a little more. So in my mind's eye I saw an old English medieval rock pier, something you would see in some old fishing town, so a chunk of that. Then I added a little bit of water around that. Friends told me to make that water bigger, and eventually it expanded into what you see now.

I wanted to add more stuff to it, maybe a little crab on the barrel, 2 eyes on stilts poking from the water, a Dredge-style fishing boat in the background, a lighthouse, but I decided against it eventually. I did learn that I really, really like working with Marmoset Toolbag. There are a few things I would like to see added, like light-linking would be amazing, but overall, its speed and quality are hard to beat for this kind of stuff.

Another thing that was a proper challenge was posing the characters together. For my posing, I use Reallusion's Character Creator 4. I only use it for its accuracy, which I think you can get separately. It is a really nice tool that can have your humanoid model rigged up in minutes (with fingers), and you can start posing your character really quickly. It even comes with pre-made poses for hands.

Send it back using GoZ, and polish it up. But for Martha, it was a tad more difficult, since she's a fish, and accuracy, surprisingly, doesn't work with fish (weird!). So I had to take the posed Ol' Jenkins into Maya, together with Martha, rig Martha myself (which I haven't done in years), and make the two work together. I did enjoy the process, though. It was fun to rig something in Maya. I had never done it there, only 3ds Max

Conclusion

My Advice for beginner artists: Spend time on presentation, don't spend a ton of time on an awesome sculpt, and then just plop it in an empty scene and throw an HDR on it and call it done. Spend some time on lighting, camera settings, and angle.

And, learn how to look, learning how to read a concept or image is super important, see what makes a concept cool, and try to capture it, look at how stuff curves, transitions, planes, and why something works or doesn't.

Kevin Beckers, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins