'Softimage XSI, ZBrush & Photoshop'

Hello, my name is Nick Gizelis and I would like to thank Jo and the 3DTotal team for their invitation to me to write a few things about the making of my image Aquaman for you.

The creation of CG characters – either realistic, or science fiction ones – is always an enjoyable and relaxing activity for me, even more so whenever I end up with a physical model of them in my hands.

My main motivation behind Aquaman was to follow a concept by another artist for the creation of a CG character. Aris Kolokontes is an artist whose work I admire and am inspired by, so I decided to base my concept on one of his bust sculptures – Fishman (Fig.01) :

I also decided to make some kind of jewel for the bust, to complete the concept of such a character.

For the bust I collected several photos of the original bust, from every angle I could find, so that I could get a good idea of the proportions.

I also thought of adding a necklace to the character in order to enhance the concept of a humanoid form of life coming from another world. I wanted to make something of a classic style, made of silver, with a precious stone in the colours of the deep sea to enhance the aquatic nature of the character.

Some time ago I made a few ZBrush materials using as reference some photos of a mineral called Labradorite, so I decided to make a jewel based on such type of stone, which is quite iridescent and colored in greenish- blueish tones. So I did some searches on the web, looking for pendants made of labradorite stones and silver and this was the result (Fig.02).

For the base mesh I used a model I’d made some time ago: a human female bust (Fig.03).