Introduction

Greets everyone! My name is Yaroslav Primachenko and in this Making Of I will tell you about my last 3D work called "A zombie in the closet”. The idea for this work came to me after watching some zombie movies and playing the brilliant Plants vs. Zombies game – why are zombies always composed of parts taken from the same species, it's so boring! These cute creatures surely deserve more, so I decided to make my own zombie and make it more creative by combining parts of different living (or should I say dead?) beings. So I drew a character called Franky – a younger brother of the famous Frankenstein monster. A freak and an outcast, hated and despised by his own family for being a vegetarian and preferring broccoli to brains. Nobody ever wrote any books or shot movies about him – his existence was a disgrace to all of his relatives. Well, there's a skeleton in everyone's closet, you know.

At first I wanted to make a more realistic-looking image with less saturated colors, but quickly changed my mind after drawing a sketch. I didn't want to lose all the opportunities that a more cartoony approach gave me – like Franky sitting on his tail as if in a rocking chair, or using such deformed proportions. I tried to create a zombie that everyone would want as a pet and would love to feed with all the stuff the zombies love to eat (brains?).

Super Modeling

I started with ZSpheres in ZBrush 3.1 – which is a great tool, especially now that version 3.5 has been released. With the ZSpheres I sought the right proportions then turned them into an editable mesh and started defining the geometry (Fig.01).



Then I exported it into 3ds Max and made some fixes where needed – cleaning the geometry and refining it even more. Fig.02 shows the results both with and without turbosmooth on.