'ZBrush'

Software Used :

Creativity comes from real-life experiences, as well as inspirational sources.  Orcs, robots, superheroes and aliens are nice, but I don’t like to limit myself to these the subjects because you see thousands of images like that on forums each day. This time, I wanted to do something close to my reality.

Early 2011, Donglu gave birth to Genny, our first child. The kid opened a whole new world for us. Breastfeeding was a big part of my new experience. Oh wait, let me rephrase that – watching my wife breastfeeding was a big part of my new experience! The first couple of days were extremely tough. My wife didn't have enough milk at the beginning, but our little girl was so craving food. That's where the idea of a plunderer comes from.

I wanted to make a baby holding breast pumps as guns. I imagined him running into milk banks and robbing milk instead of cash. I needed to do something simple and quick, since my week-old Genny wouldn't let me touch my computer for long.

I started with the default body mesh from Mudbox (Fig.01) and quickly modified the body into baby proportions in ZBrush. The trick with ZBrush is to try and do as much as possible with a really low subdivision. There’s really no need to boost up the poly count to get the shape done. As you can see from Fig.02, the poly count on the baby is 8k, only one subdivision from the base mesh.

Once the proportion was done, I worked on the low level details a little bit. The brushes I usually use are Standard, Clay, Trim Dynamic, and Smooth. In fact any brushes are good as long as I get the result that I want. It was hard to spend a straight hour working on something with a baby crying beside me. See Fig.03 for the result from the first night. It was quite rough compared to most of the ZBrush works you can easily find online nowadays.