I really adore the work of this artist Pablo Munzo Gomez, a fantastic Character artist fro Melbourne Australia.
HARD SURFACE MODELLING IN ZBRUSH
Here’s a little character Pablo created while Beta testing Zbrush 2018. He has such a beautiful design and is sculpted terrifically, however my favorite thing about this artist’s work is how he creates his textures. They are gorgeous and display a wonderful level of tactility. Pablo uses keyshot in order to render his work. His work is textured in polypaint and I am really amazed at the level of quality and detail achieved. While I don’t really model many hard surface character’s, this work makes me want to try!
 I used this project to test the new features and find how they can fit into my workflow, so with this robot, I used pretty much all the new major features to model it, detail it and set it up for render.
– Pablo Munzo Gomez
ASKING THE ARTIST
I spoke to him about his work asking him about his process for his latest sculpt of a little goat on a hill. He pointed me in the direction of his timelapse that he created for it. Texture wise it feels to me like a oxide paint on ceramic. Its beautiful and something I would love to have a go at emulating to see if I can.
This piece named ‘warrior’ by Pablo, was created using zbrush and the render taken into photoshop. It is an excellent example of amazing texture work. The paint on the man’s body seems so real. I am going to have to really rethink my aversion to polypaint and give it another try.
Marco Pavone is an exceptional 3D Modeller and author of the  book, The Art of Polygonal Modelling. I am a huge fan of his work and closely follow the tutorials and videos he releases of his process. He specialises in character faces for animation so his emphasis is on using box modelling techniques in order to have more control on the topology of his characters. His process heavily relies on modelling topology from scratch without a prior sculpt, something that I am not accustom to.
In Pavone’s book he explains the balance between technical skill and artistic ability. In order for artistic ability to be presented in the best possible way, technical skill needs to be implemented. His belief that the software should not limit you is also a major theme and something I I very much appreciate.
‘Sculpting is a good technique, but you will have less control of your final 3D model. i It’s perfect for rigid models (for a background props, like a tree for example), but if you have to animate them, modeling is the best way to create a perfect mesh. By modeling you create and control every single vertex and face, and you can manage the number of polygons.’ – Marco Pavone
Example – Werewolf head model
Above is an example of one of his methods of model creation. His technique for this head sculpt is to work entirely within a Maya in order to create the topology straight away. As I usually start off all my characters within zbrush, this method is something I’m not hugely familiar with, however hearing how Pavone describes the benefits of working this way I will certainly try it on future models. You can see the steps of this process i the images below. Notice –
His initial ‘roughing out’ of the topology using flat polygons (Even though some tri’s and preset this will be corrected later)
He quickly starts to create curvature and shape from this , always with topology in mind. Notice here the main expressive features start to form as their topology is refined. (Eyes and nostrils)
Some tri’s still present but corrected as the process moves along.
Smooth selection is used to move the half mesh around and get the shape right before the mesh is mirrored across.
Mesh is mirrored across and at this point the mouth interior becomes a major priority.
Lastly its small features such as teeth and tongue that are created.
Study 2 – Old Boxer
This human head sculpt is another really nice example of effective box modelling. On top of Marco’s technical ability his artistic ability is also really strong. His character designs are always very clean and bold, and his expressions are beautiful. Expressiveness is something I really want to work on and that’s why its important for me to follow his tutorials and workshops. Below you can see an example of his character expression sheets.
While I still think that sculpting is a very important part of 3D character creation, I can appreciate the advantages of Box modelling. I have also heard from Modelling supervisor at Brown Bag Films in Dublin, Siobhan Doyle, that Box modelling is always something to focus on.
Anna and Callum’s project is the story of a young rabbit trying to overcome his fears. In this short, the villain takes the form of a large wolf and I have agreed to help create him.
The Brief
Anna already had a really clear idea of how she wanted the wolf to look. Features of her design included –
An abnormally large and menacing mouth
Broad shoulders and a sloping back
Thin Legs
Large fluffy mane (To be done with XGEN BY Callum)
Large prominent teeth and claws
almost diamond shaped eyes
Facial features and structure more Fox like than wolf like
Possibly Ribs showing
Below are the designs that Anna kindly passed along for me to work from –
(ANNA MCRAITH)
RESEARCH
Gael Kerchenbaum
For research I began looking at artists whom I found inspiring and who had good insights on animal anatomy. One of my favourite Zbrush artists is Gael Kerchenbaum. He has a terrific grasp of animal muscle structure and anatomy.
Image converted using ifftoany
Gael demonstrates a beautiful ability to capture the heart of the animal (At the risk of sounding cheesy). He also beautifully lays out his process throughout the creation of the creature.
His process is as follows –
Put together a reference board of the type of creature you wish to create.
Sculpt out the skeleton of your creature. After that flesh him out.
Next create a reference board for detailing and colour.
Once the normal maps and textures are created then the creature is ready to render.
While I won’t be following the entire creation process with the wolf, I still want to keep Gael’s process in mind. For this task, Anna and Callum have asked me to sculpt and retopo their character.
Joe Weatherly
Joe Weatherly’s animal drawings are also massivley helpful when it comes to working on animal sculpts. I have owned his book for many years and constantly use it to check anatomy and poses.
Creating a Wolf Reference Board
NOTE: Original digital RAW file is missing for this image.
Once I had my reference board (containing art by Joe weatherly, wolf photography and images of the dog body in bodyworlds), I realised that the maned wolf would be a good reference for this as it is more Fox like, with skinny legs and a sloping back, much like the brief.
My process in Zbrush is mainly using DYNAMESH. I create a basic sphere and use the Build Clay and Movement tool in order to move my mesh around, ever expanding it using the Dynamesh. Once I have a solid structure I am able to go in with a variety of other brushes and reform and refine my model. Once the mesh is looking how I want it I add other subtools for eyes, horns and claws or any other extremities. I then bring it into Zbrushes Zremesher. Here I am able to use the Edgeflow tool in order to draw on where I want my edgeflow to be and paint it so that zbrush can determine how dense the mesh should be in certain areas. For example it should be more dense around the face and hands.
3D Artist Heather Nicole Smith shows this really niceley using one of her models. The first image showing the creation of the Edge flow, and the second showing how zbrush interprets that Data.
This is another really helpful video by underground Education that helped me on the subject.
THE MODEL
I have worked quite a bit with zbrush over the past couple of years and so I was able to pretty quickly try and get a sense of what a 3d version of this character might be like…
Adding a little colourÂ
While we knew that this was a rough up, its always nice to quickly block in colours to get a clearer feel for the character and what he might be like.
Moving foward
From this point I knew I needed to really refine the model and try and bring back some of the character and charm of the drawing. In order to do this I sat with mike and discussed the character and how we could improve him. He did a few little drawings for me to help me plan how I was going to move forward.
After the conversation I sat and tidied up his sculpt. Here was the result –
As you can see it’s a pretty big difference with the main changes being…
Reducing head size to give him a wiser appearance
Fixing his hands to something more natural and ape-like
bringing back the harsh angles from the original drawing.
The sloping back and tufts of hair are features we all still really like so artistically I think he is going in a direction we are all really happy with!
As my interests have drawn me toward the creature side of things I have started looking into how we could potentially have a shapeshift within our animation. Â This really beautiful little animation demonstrates the ‘breaking’ of the rig to extreme deformations and overlaps to achieve a melding effect.
In this awesome talk about creature animation the animator Jalil Sadool talks about different challenges in his career. While being an exceptionally helpful and interesting watch, I also saw an animation he had done of a game called Dauntless of a creature called a shriek. The shriek is an owl like creature that transforms its wings to become a quadruped. The animation is really fluid and it would be an interesting way to carry out Puca’s shapeshifting.
Some other points Sadool mentions are that while animating, there are cheats that you can use in order to make a shot work. For example a creature landing quickly and stoping abruptly. While this may not look right from all angles you can play with the animation and make it work for that one camera, by exaggerating other movements to distract the audience. This is something we should  keep in mind when it comes to planning our shots.
My attempt at a shapeshift animation –
While the animation itself is awful it was more a test to actually see what the possibility of a shape shift could be like. Animatic permitting we may remove any shapeshifts in future.
So with the latest animatic of our script we got some really interesting feedback about our characters. Nami, our young female protagonist, was coming across as idiotic and a brat while Puca our guardian was behaving like an asshole. Long story short – they were unlikable. With this in mind we need to rethink how we are going to present our characters and what they’re traits should be.
For Nami, this means looking at some other young female protagonists and seeing how they are portrayed. Examples of young, ‘strong’ female protagonists who are fundamentally likable are fairly common.
With he recent release of Season 2 of Stranger Things , I am reminded of the character of Eleven. Eleven is a similar age to Nami, and as Nami has magical abilities as well, they have a lot of similarities. Eleven is quiet, and out of her comfort zone, with little understanding of the outside world. Her childhood abuse is something that makes the audience automatically care for her. Similarly to this, the character of Harry Potter is also an orphan and a victim of abuse and neglect.  This creates a desire to protect the young protagonist and see them thrive. It is perhaps something we should be considering when deciding Nami’s backstory.
Sorcha had also come across these Articles by Cindy Grigg, that speak about female characters and their tropes. Here are a list of common character tropes that we should avoid.
The Kick-butt Action Girl – Likes to punch, kick, and be tough
The Mary Sue – Written to fulfill the author’s fantasies or concept of self-perfection
The Crone or Hag – Old woman who can curse or harm others, literally or socially
The Perfect Wife – Ideal suburban 50s housewife, for example
Puca is our Guardian character, however he was coming across to the audience as unnecessarily mean and cruel. He was impossible to like. So we really need to round his edges. We need to build that relationship between Nami and Puca and show that they actually do care about eachother. Our feedback was to look more at Puca as being a Guardian and a mentor character.
After being told this I started looking at a variety of different mentor characters such as Master Shifu from KungFu Panda, Mr Myagi from Karate Kid and Bagheera from the Jungle Book.
The group wanted a fresh look at Puca. While the class seemed relatively positive about the current bipedal design we did receive feedback from people that he seemed somewhat demonic. This is really not something we wanted to go for. We also had abigail tell us that he reminded her of Mushu from Mulan, also a character we didn’t want to emulate. We were also very aware that a 8 foot tall bipedal character would be extremely difficult to get in shot with our 5 ft 2 protagonist. Below is an example of where height wise each character would need to be. As you can see fitting these characters in shot at the same time would be a challenge. What’s worse Nami would be at crotch level with Puca, which doesn’t make for a good composition at all!
Therefore I decided that a more practical redesign should be constructed. We were still contemplating style and so I decided to make a more graphic, 2-dimensional drawing style for the character. I made
A Quadruped – to bring him just above eye level with Nami
Muscular – to bring him away from the frail fairy shape the creature has so commonly had.
Horns – a feature we still really liked in the initial designs.
Blue hues and ‘feathers’ – these added to the overall grey and brought about a nice contrast making him more visually appealing.
A disproportioned characterized body shape – simply making him a bit more interesting than a normal quadruped.
RESEARCH FOR THIS DESIGN
Terryl Witlatch’s work was a huge inspiration to me here as I knew that we wanted to have Puca be a mixture of other creatures. I began looking at her bulky larger quadrupeds such as bears and gorilla’s as well as her alien designs.
These are some of her beautiful alien designs of heavyweight creatures. Each of them have –
Large Powerful Forearms
Sloping back
Large imposing head (All carnivores?)
Ridge of fur along back
Short, squat back legs
Muscular
Large front paws/hands comparatively to back feet.
I also spent some time looking at Terryl’s Gorilla and bear anatomical drawings to get a sense for how Puca’s muscle and bone structure would look.
Again the sloping back is apparent as well as overall powerful mucles. Above you can see the similarities and differences between the Quadruped prey animal of a horse and the structure of an omnivore predator with the bear and gorilla. I figured I wanted Puca’s bodily anatmony to fall somewhere on the spectrum of gorilla and bear. This also means that he will likely be an omnivore.
The animals that I wanted to emulate within Puca’s design evolved into more bulky and intimidating species. Gorillas, primarily silverbacks were looked at closely along with grizzly bears and black jaguars. Other creatures I wanted to incorporate were goats and owls. In some ways Puca is the body of a gorilla and a bear, the horns, ears and beard of a goat, the large, wide head of a jaguar, and the eyes of an owl.
DIFFERENT CONCEPTS
I showed this initial design to many people and I received a general consensus that it was a step in the right direction. So I decided to do another redesign and push the character a little further…
I wanted to see what the character would look like in his bird form as well as in his natural form. I tried to keep many of the same features on both. The white outlines added to the character and proved to be a bit hit when I showed them to the team and others. However the style just wasn’t right but it was certainly heading in the right direction. Mike’s advice was that the character was too rounded and friendly seeming. He was supposed to be a tough, intimidating character yet he was round and cuddly.
The Break through…
After further sketches and designs the team had a bit of a breakthrough. Sorcha had been drawing Nami while being influenced by the art of Jamie Hewlett. She had taken inspiration from the long limbs and sharp angles with some of her drawings. I decided to allow myself to adopt the style in order to get another perspective on the character and achieve some of the grit that we had been lacking. I worked extremely well and this was the design I produced –
The sharp angles for the body and horns were something we all really loved and wanted to bring across into the 3D.
In order to achieve this look I had delved into the work of James Hewlett. The large bright contrasted eyes, sharp edged grittiness and distorted proportions were a look we all really liked. You can see the influences in Puca’s design in the eyebrows, and toothy grin. The graphic cel shaded style was something I used in my work however i’m not sure if we are using this style in our final product.
Natasha showed me a very interesting article with James Hewlett, in which he speaks of his influences. Brunel, Mort Drucker and Jack Davis were all influences on Hewlett. Of these I think the most apparent influence of Hewlett’s work has been Jack Davis’ caricatures. Their distorted poses and menacing feel, share a similar quality to Hewlett’s own work.
I used to read Mad magazine, actually. When Alfred E. Neuman ran Mad magazine, I used to be a huge fan of artists like Brunel, Mort Drucker, Jack Davis, and all that stuff when I was younger. And a lot of peculiar English artists as well. There was this one artist in particular called Giles who used to do sort of a satirical strip in the daily newspapers, and I loved his work. And Ronald Lowe was also a huge inspiration to me as well.
We are making a 3-4 minute minisode pilot , for 7-11 year olds, in the fantasy horror genre. Therefore we are aimed at pitching to networks that cater for the 7-11 age range, cartoon network, nickelodeon, disney XD, CBBC, Dreamworks TV, especially for the new age of streaming services.
Natasha introduced us to a really interesting book called Animation Development by David b.levy. Â The book empasises the importance of characters that drive a narrative. To paraphrase we need ‘Characters that are interesting enough that you put them in a room by themselves they would carry a story.’
Levy also emphasises the need to have experience when pitching to commissioners. This worried us due to our minimal industry experience.
We decided to look and see if we could find any research that could give further insight into how we could pitch. We found this talk by Mark Mayerson at Animatic T.O, which states that we should pitch with the audience in mind, rather than just focusing on commissioners.
From here we went on to look at shows that really use audience as best as they can. Â A favourite animation of mine and a definite inspiration for our project is ‘The Lion’s Blaze’ by Olan Rodgers. Olan started out on youtube and has been able to amass a huge following through consistent posting of quality material. This following meant that when we went to commissioners with his show, he was able to show them that his idea was already popular. ‘Final Space’ one of his creations, has just been greenlit.
My goal for this year is to create a creature design or multiple creature designs and expand my knowledge as a 3D Modeller and texture artist. Therefore I thought it best to look at a project that would center around or feature a variety of creatures. While I enjoy working on humans my strength and interest has always been with animals.
The idea began with a book my boss Jude showed me while I was working at Mashmob. It was called, ‘Folkore and Myths of Britian’. Within it there was a huge range of beasts and magical creatures, that I began spending my lunchtimes drawing. While Flicking through I found a creature called the Puca. The Puca is a shapeshifting trickster of Irish Origin.
Pooka pronounced poo-ka is from the old Irish ‘Puca, which means ‘goblin’. There are many variations of the spelling Pooka some of which are Puca, Plica, Phuca,Pwwka, Puka or Pookha all of which are totally acceptable. It is possible that the origin of the word Pooka may come from the Scandinavian word Pook or Puke meaning ‘nature sprit’. (https://www.yourirish.com/folklore/irish-pookas)
(When a Puca calls, Celticmythpod) Â
(NOROT-ART.com)
The Puca can take many forms, but it’s most common is that of a jet black horse with glowing eyes. It is also written to take the form of a black hare, a black dog/wolf and a black goat. Its true form is said to be a mix of all of them. Me being a sucker for the dark and the creepy was instantly intranced by such a creature.
Stories tell of Puca tricking weary travellers to ride on his back. Â He would then take them on a terrifying ride including death-defying leaps and ending in the rider being thrown. Puca’s are also conversationalists and so will stop and talk for hours before vanishing without a trace.
Only one man has ever managed to ride the pooka and that was Brian Boru, the High King of Ireland. Using a special bridle containing three hairs from the pooka’s tail, Brian managed to control the magic horse and stay on its back until, exhausted, it surrendered to his will. The king extracted two promises from it; firstly, that it would no longer torment Christian people and ruin their property and secondly, that it would never again attack an Irishman (all other nationalities are exempt) except those who are drunk or abroad with an evil intent. The latter it could attack with greater ferocity than before. The pooka agreed to these conditions. However, over the intervening years, it seems to have forgotten its bargain and attacks on property and sober travellers on their way home continue to this day.(http://www.irelandseye.com/paddy3/preview2.htm)
So why this creature for our story? Well, we like the potential for a morally ambiguous trickster. On top of that his ability to shapeshift drew us to him all the more as it adds a lot of possibilities story wise. I personally have been focusing on Puca’s character more, as I feel that’s where I can do the best work. I generally have more interest in creature character creation, than human.
Storywise we started thinking about how this creature could fit into a storyline. I knew sorcha was interested in having a young girl as a protagonist in the story and so I quickly began to develop ideas that would show some sort of relationship between the two.
Initially, our idea was to have our young girl character be a bounty hunter who is seeking out The Puca to capture him, but our breakthrough didn’t really happen for over a month until we decided that the two characters should have a friendship and a father/daughter type relationship.
Some of the characters we’ve been looking at as an inspiration to what Puca could be like are Rick from Rick and Morty, Stan from Gravity Falls, The Hound from Game of Thrones and Squidward from SpongeBob. We want an unapologetically grumpy and mean a character with a soft side hidden under it all. He should act resentful and cold, but deep down he cares.
(Gravity Falls, Rick and Morty, Game of Thrones, Spongebob)
Nami
We knew we wanted our protagonist to be a young girl. Initially, we planned for her to be a bounty hunter, who’s journey was to capture the puca, and in doing so she struck up a deal with him. However, as we looked further into the character we decided we wanted her to have magical abilities. As a group of friends, the team is all very passionate about fantasy as so it made sense to introduce this element to her character.
We don’t want Nami to be the typical female heroine. We really want to think outside the box with her. There is nothing worse than having false girl power shoved in your face. We’re looking for a character that seems real. Think, Ellie, from The Last of Us, or Arya Stark from Game of Thrones. Both are characters that not only defy what their gender roles are but have depth and weight too.
(Last of Us, Game of Thrones)
Of course both the Last of Us and Game of Thrones are heavy, adult material, and so she’ll need an edge that kids can relate to as well. Enter Star from Star Vs the Forces of Evil. Hyperactive and energetic, adding a dash of childish glee and enthusiasm into Nami’s character will really help kid’s relate to her.
The World
Our character Nami is a young witch in training and so has a lot to learn. Her grandmother is a powerful and respected witch. Nami is ambitious and reckless and so steals her Granny’s enchanted book and uses it to try and get a familiar of her own. This process involves reaching into the ‘otherworld’ and extracting a familiar. Â In her attempt, she accidentally rips a hole between her world called the ‘Otherworld’, a place full of monsters and mythical creatures. Â They come pouring through the crack, filling her world with monsters, some friendly, some harmless and some extremely dangerous. Nami’s Grandmother gets blamed for Nami’s crime, and so is locked away. Now it’s up to Nami, her friend Tato and her grandmother’s familiar Puca to put the monsters back where they belong and save her granny.
The Minisode
For the series we want it to run on a ‘monster of the week’ type format. For this mini episode that we intend on making for our project we have been coming up with a variety of ideas for potential scenarios.
A scenario we settled on was one in which our characters would try and break into an evil witch’s hut, in order to steal a powerful amulet they could use to capture the monsters.
(When a Puca calls, Celticmythpod) Â 
Kerry McCormick 