Marcin Klicki showed how he created a Zbrush monument to the most influential person in the games industry.
Marcin Klicki showed how he created a ‘Zbrush monument’ to the most influential person in the games industry.
Introduction
My name is Marcin Klicki. I come from Poland. I was born in Gorzow Wlkp. Now I live and work in Warsaw. I’m a Senior Character Artist at CD Projekt Red Studio. I worked on many different project in the last couple of years but those that I am most proud of are Witcher 3, Witcher 3 Hearts of Stone and Witcher 3 Blood and Wine. Earlier I worked on commercials, films and cinematics in Platige Image Studio.
I got into „the industry” quite early, I did several works with my colleagues and one of them was spotted by CGTalk and other websites. Later on everything went on. I moved to Warsaw and started working for Platige Image Studio. However, the hardest thing was to make a few steps back and reconsider what really gives me the most fun, and that I would like to do the characters. This required a few changes of work in order to find this ideal place for me. I admit that it was a difficult few years in my life. But in the end everything was successful, now it is mine fifth year at CD Projekt Red Studio.
Lord Gaben
I really started to do his face some time ago on the “weekly speed sculpting” just for the fun. For long time it was on my computer but nothing more happened. Later it turned out that I have a chance to test new ZBrush 4.8. I came to the conclusion that it would be a good opportunity to test new features and by the way do something for yourself. And that’s why I started to make crown using new tools, e.g. booleans, arrays and others.
Workflow
My main goal was to do as many elements of this work in ZBrush as I could. I tried not to exit this program even though I needed to model something in poly, for that I used Zmodeller. Of course I did not manage to do it all that way, clothes I left to the end and I made them in Marvelous, but the processing I did in the Zbrush.
Then, I blocked the whole scene in Zbrush and exchanged individual elements for almost finished ones. At the beginning I was dealing with the face, as the face was finished I went to do the crown. After the crown I made the body. As I had such a prepared model, I simplified it and I put it into Marvelous in two states. One with lowered hands and the other as morph in the pose. Thanks to the materials, I could immediately match them to the entire statue. The rest of minor fixes I made in Zbrush.
Using the new version of ZBrush
Yes, for me personally, the new Zbrush is such a turn when it comes to making scenes in Zbrush and generally preparing of production models as well as for printing.
As I mentioned before, I tried to use as many new tools as I could. I like Gizmo, Vector Displacement and Live Booleans. Particularly helpful in my work are VDM, Live Boolean and new local deformations at Gizmo. I would say even that they are a kind of Game Changer. Of course, to the full happiness Live Booleans still lack automatic bevel making but it’s rather the details.
Either way, practically all the crown I’ve done with a Zmodeler and deformers, which are great help to shape precisely the objects you are working on. VDMs allow you to save and duplicate millions of details while retaining the same grid, it’s just something beautiful. Last but not least, if you prepare models for printing, then Live Booleans will simply be your best friend.
Most of the new tools I used while doing the crown, mostly deformers and arrays.
A few screenshots:
On several other models I literally used tons of VDMs.
Couple of screenshots:
Booleans:
The new Zbrush program is a mastery for me, in this program a lot of new features have been added. That really improve the quality and speed of work in this software. Finally I hope that in the next version of Zbrush Live Booleans will be able to set bevels in the places of cuts. I don’t have any more wishes.