Introduction

Hello everyone! I'm Ricardo Jost and I work as a character animator and CG artists. I live in Brazil, where I was born, and I'd like to share the creation process behind my recent personal work: "Cool Guy”.

Inspiration & References

For my artistic development, I always want to piece together cartoon forms of expression, with realistic aspects that could convince human eyes. An opportunity to do this came when I was modeling a cartoon face with a poly-by-poly method for my course. The face was very narrow with big eyes and without a chin. Then, taking my inspiration from artists like Antropus – especially the work at the beginning of his career – and films like Shrek, I decided to produce a still (Fig.01).


The idea for the still image was to reproduce a photo session of a guy – to create a portrait. The conceptwas that he would be a charismatic nerd, and be very excited about the photo session. It would be two pictures of him in two contrasting moments: in the first moment he doesn't know that he is being photographed, and in the other he is really posing for the shot.

With this concept in my mind, I looked for some references on the internet and at stock photos. After finding a couple of interesting photos, I decided to do a freckled face with gingery-brown hair (Fig.02).

Modeling / Sculpting

I started modeling the face in XSI. By the way, in my opinion XSI is a wonderful piece of software for organic modeling because of its practical tools (Fig.03).


The method is used was poly-by-poly. After the symmetrical model was done, I made the shape of him smiling (Fig.04). Next I brought the model into 3ds Max and opened the UV Map there.


In 3ds Max, I modeled the turtle neck sweater. It was basic modeling from a Lathe Modifier and a FFD Modifier applied to fit onto the neck (Fig.05). For the stripes, I used a displacement map that I drew in Photoshop according to the photo texture, and a bump map to make the details of the fabric (Fig.06). A good reference for this process is Viki Yeo's "Young Girl” Making Of. (Click here to view young girl making of.)