'Softimage XSI, ZBrush, Mudbox, Fusion & Photoshop'

My name is David Arberas and I’ve been studying special effects for two years in my native town, Donostia. The idea of making this 3D model came when I was searching for a good quality 2D cartoon character artwork and I found Zurdom’s (www.zurdom.com) awesome artworks. I fell in love immediately with the Sandoje character, because of its cartoony style and wonderful details (Fig.01), so I sent an email to Zurdom asking for permission to make it in 3D and he kindly gave me permission to do that.

Well, I’ll not fool anyone; this was my first attempt at making a 3D character based on a piece of artwork. Because of that I spent a lot of time analyzing the artwork in order to discover things like how the monster-like hand is biting the sword, how the barrel is connected to fuel through the tube and what the hell is written in barrel’s little cartel... At this point I also started thinking about the technical details I knew I was going to have to face: did I need to use textures for all objects? And in that case, how should I group the objects to pack in UV islands? Which programs did I need to use for sculpting, texturing etc?

I’ll stop there because I don’t want to bore you! I just wanted to explain how my mind works when I face a project like this.

In this step, the main question was if I should model the character directly in the artwork pose or T-pose. I didn’t spent much time thinking about it: I wanted to make a 3D illustration, not an animated scene, so I decided to make Sandoje directly in the artwork pose (Fig.02).