Sculpting Magneto in ZBrush

Introduction

Hi! My name is Julio Cesar Benavides Macias.

Even though I personally study a lot, I’ve been feeling like I need to upgrade my level of anatomy and hard surface skills. There was a moment I felt stuck, that’s why I studied even more to be able to apply all my knowledge and leave my comfort zone exploring new ideas and concepts. Right now, I’m working on my next personal project in which I’ll be able to apply my anatomy, hard-surface, illumination, and rendering skills. My goal is to develop an amazing artwork and show a part of its process, push myself, and finally, have fun.

Magneto: How It Started

Speaking of the Magneto project, I wanted to create an awesome sculpture and how the character’s real power. I love this character and have always dreamed about having his superpowers. The idea of the project actually appeared randomly when I was watching X-Men: Apocalypse. During one scene I thought that I must represent that moment and give it some kind of a twist.  I wanted to show both sides of Magneto – his pain and power. 

Body

Anatomy was hard as I tried to get a combination of the realistic and comic book looks. I used many references including my comics and best comic book sculptures to study the way those were made. Also, I found a lot of inspiration in sculptures by Daniel Bel and Erick Sosa.

I always start with painting lines to get an idea of where the muscles go. Next, I use ClayBuild brush to get some primary forms and Inflate brush to exaggerate specific parts. 

For the suit, I made 5 different paintovers on the mesh to understand how to make it.

Props

The iron props took me three days as I kept going back and forth switching between different ideas over and over.

In the images below, I tried to explain how I made some of the props/  The most difficult part for me was the boots because I wanted to make them especially well. I started to play with the lines and then continued the process gradually taking care of the final look.

Afterword

Speaking of the challenges, anatomy was definitely the biggest one, plus all the small details. I had quite many ideas for this project, so there were some parts I had to rebuild from scratch. The funniest part is that I didn’t really know how the final model would look like – it is like an exploration sketch.

Julio Cesar Benavides Macias, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev