Concept

Well, I started this project thinking that I wanted a funny image – nothing realistic, I simply wanted a character with some personality. At first I thought about creating a boxer, but something made me change my mind ... I started looking for hunter references and, when I saw them, I was ready to start modelling my character. To complete the composition I also modelled a Jeep Wrangler; the Background was created by my friend, André Pereira, a talented 2D and 3D artist.

References

I didn't want to achieve a realistic model, but still, realistic references were very important to me. Hunters normally have a lot of camouflage clothes and lots of accessories, so I started looking for pictures of rifles, knives, binoculars, cartoon characters and, of course, hunters. Pixar's work really inspired me on this one, but there were some more things like Jumanji's Hunter Van Pelt, pieces by Bobby Chiu and so many other artists around. I collected as many pictures and movie screens as I could to help me (Fig.01 – 02). Pre-production is everything!

Modelling

This is the part that I had the most fun doing; creating a character that you have visualised is just so cool. I had the character's body type in my mind, but I just couldn't figure out what his head was going to be like. I tried modelling 5 or 6 different concepts before I got the final head. It was a hard, but pleasant work. Talking a bite more technically about it, to model the head I made a cube with some divisions, played along with the vertices, subdivided it a little to be able to do the loops – et voilà (Fig.03 – 06).



For the body I wanted to make some muscles and I find this a lot easier to do poly by poly, because you can define the main loops and then weld it all together. With this character, I started defining the chest, the clavicle and then the belly; the rest was simply adjusting volumes (Fig.07 – 11).




The same goes for his clothes, which were created with a mix of poly modelling and mesh extraction from parts of the body. I mixed these techniques here just because I like to create wrinkles before the general volume of the clothes – it gives me more control (Fig.12 – 14).