Making of 'The Hunter'

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).

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

As for the accessories, it was more of the same in terms of technique, but I had loads of fun making them
(Fig.15 - 19).

Fig. 19

Fig. 19

Texturing

Well I've got to be honest: I lost all of the textures that I used for this guy in a computer crash (yeah, I know, I should have backed up) so I won't have many WIP images to show you here (Fig.20), but I can say some things about the process itself. For the Hunter I used a little ZBrush to simulate his skin and pores and to paint his basic colours. I made the pores a little darker than the rest of the skin with the masking options (Fig.21).

And so I went on making more details in ZBrush for his accessories (Fig.22 - 24).

Fig. 20

Fig. 20

For the car I worked with a mix of procedural and bitmap textures. I made some masks in Photoshop for the dirt parts and mixed them in XSI's Render Tree with 2 phongs with different diffuse and specularity (Fig.25).

Fig. 25

Fig. 25

Setup & Envelope

I made a little video to show you the basic character setup and facial deformation - no advanced constraints; I just did it to pose the character since I had no intention on animating it (Video.01).

Video.01



Lighting

For this image I used a sphere with an HDRi as an environment to make the reflections look better; a Spot light was used to simulate the sun, and a white plane was used for the Final Gathering to work (Fig.26).

Fig. 26

Fig. 26

And here's the final image (Fig.27), thanks for reading!

Fig. 27

Fig. 27

Fetching comments...

Post a comment