Making Of 'Medieval Daredevil'

Hi there everybody! I would like to share with you the step-by-step creation process behind my Comicon 2011 challenge entry, which was a medieval version of one of my favorite characters: "the man without fear" (hominem sine timore in Latin) - Daredevil.

First I was thinking about making him look like a classic Dark Ages knight with plates and all those heavy accessories, but during the challenge lots of people wanted to see him lighter. They were right! Daredevil is a character that jumps over rooftops and needs to look agile.

Other sources of inspiration included the AC series and The Game of Thrones TV show for clothing style and fabric references. In the beginning I drew a lot of different sketches to find the initial look for the character, using all my references as guides (Fig.01 - 02).

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

After I'd established the basic design, I started the sculpting sessions in ZBrush, blocking in over a base mesh for the helmet first (Fig.03). I then began to build the clothing parts separately for the retopology later (Fig.04).

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

The basic sculpting was pretty fast since my aim was just to work on the simple shapes, such as the most important folds and proportions, before going into Topogun (Fig.05 - 07).

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

Once I'd finished the final blocking, I started to build the retopology using Topogun. The cool thing about working this way is that I could refine the mesh in ZBrush and update the decimated mesh after doing the little details to project under the low poly mesh. Except the arms, for which I did a quick retopology in ZBrush, all the rest was Topogun work (Fig.08 - 10).

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Fig. 09

Fig. 09

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Jumping to ZBrush again, I placed the basic coloring for each part using masks and color with deformers. Sometimes this can save you very precious time and can be cleaned when the work reaches the final texturing stage (Fig.11 - 13).

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

After completing that part I refined the textures and did some tests in Marmoset Toolbag to see if the normals, specular and difuse maps were working fine. Once in a while the normals will have some distortions that need cleaning. I did the unwrapping using UVMaster and some retouches and grouped them in 3ds Max (Fig.14 - 16).

Fig. 14

Fig. 14

Fig. 15

Fig. 15

Fig. 16

Fig. 16

The next step was to think about a pedestal. I had three options: a ruin, a pillar or a classic rectangular carved stone. I decided to go for the ruins and the stone, and used some photo references to sculpt it (Fig.17 - 18).

Fig. 17

Fig. 17

Fig. 18

Fig. 18

My lighting setup was quite simple: I used two lights (spot with shadows and a simple spherical light) and a slightly sunlit ambience. For the render setup I activated the rendered occlusion and bloom (Fig.19 - 20).

Fig. 19

Fig. 19

Fig. 20

Fig. 20

I posed the character using Transpose Master linked with a ZSphere rig in ZBrush (Fig.21).

Fig. 21

Fig. 21

After that it was just a matter of presentation and submitting the final image (Fig.22 - 24).

Fig. 22

Fig. 22

Fig. 23

Fig. 23

Fig. 24

Fig. 24

That's it (Fig.25)! I hope you enjoyed this Making Of. It was an amazing competition, full of lots of fun and discoveries. Congrats to all who took part!

Fig. 25

Fig. 25

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