Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Marcos Nicacio, I currently work at Best-CG as a character designer, modeler and animator and I'd like to share the creation process behind my most recent job.

Inspiration & References

Since being a kid, I've always liked to play video games – particularly the Mega Man series. In the Mega Man X game, a character suddenly appeared who was different from the kinds of character I was accustomed to seeing in the previous games. His name was Zero, he had long blond hair, a light sword and he looked more like a villain than a good guy. I thought his design was great and very audacious and from that point onwards, I became a huge fan of his character and started to play only as Zero whenever I could.

Nowadays, I've chosen to make a high-end, fan art version of the character, as I've never seen before in any games of the series.

To make the character as I wanted, the first step was to gather references that I could use to hit on the right proportions because during the game series, Zero had different heights and designs. Some of these can be seen in the references from: (http://www.themmnetwork.com/gallery/) (Fig.01 & Fig.02).

Modeling

The best part for me was the modeling. It's always great to make a project where you can mix organic and inorganic modeling in the same mesh.

I started with the head (Fig.03) to help to get the other parts of the body in proportion, based on the references. Next I began modeling the inorganic parts, which were the helmet and the chest armor (Fig.04) and then I created the shoulders, arms and hands (Fig.05). After all of this was done, I could visualize really well the volume I wanted to the character to have.