ZBrushCentral

"I are the dark mage" - Toy sculpt

Hey guys!

I’ve always loved those vinyl and resin figures of popular anime and game characters. They drew a lot of artistic fascination from me as a teen. Although I made myself stop buying them a while ago, I still just love looking at some.
So I thought I’d try something different for a project, and made one of my own. With this spinoff of the classic ‘black mage’ type character.
The Art-Machine interpretation, of course :wink:

And here it is on its base.

And here are the sculpts in Zbrush.

The newer tools like Dynamesh, were a big help in the challenges I faced in trying to design this with as few 3D-printable/moldable chunks as possible. It was also interesting working with the limitations of casting materials and mold making in mind. As well as planning out how to ‘chunk’ the pieces into joinable parts. This project definitely forced me to polish up on the newer tools of Zbrush which I had fallen behind with lately. But best of all it brought unique challenges that taught me new tricks/techniques, opening up a ton of ideas for future projects.

Anyway, hope you like it! I expect this won’t be my last time making one of these.

Attachments

Icon.jpg

ZbrushShotsBase.JPG

BLMWIP35-g.jpg

BLMWIP35-f.jpg

BLMWIP35-d.jpg

BLMWIP35-e.jpg

ZbrushShotsMage.JPG

BLMWIP35-b.jpg

BLMWIP35-c.jpg

BLMWIP35.jpg

This is super awesome. Really well done! Are the toys for sale in retail?

Nicely done! I like the idea of two different bases (one, on the books, the second, over the full base)

Would love to see you get this 3d printed.

-Steve

IS this for a toy line?
It looks nice.

I’m surprised this didn’t grab much attention. Very well done!

Love it. Such a great character :slight_smile:

Love it 100%!

Ahah, can’t fool you guys! And I tried so hard to make them look like photos of a real toy… What gave it away?
Guess I can show these ‘unpainted resin’ version renders now.

BLMWIP36.jpg
BLMWIP36-b.jpg

In fact this was not only my first time sculpting for a toy model, but also presenting my work through Vray. I’m glad you guys like it, and yeah it is a little disappointing how few comments it got, but I’ve come to expect it with this kind of style.

I can now be more specific in that Dynamesh was a big help in simulating the molded look between elements, because it tends to smooth out joints between subtools. Combined with Vray it gave a very satisfying realistic edge to it. Polypaint of course was used in a basic way, trying to simulate airbrushing and staining type of techniques that would be used in painting a real model. My main problem with DYnamesh is that it can’t be reconstructed as a lower resolution, so I had to resort to manual retopology and projection in order to be able to UV the model for rendering, sadly. But, if this was to go straight to a toy, that step wouldn’t be necessary. Also I got much use out of DecimationMaster to import the meshes into 3ds without exploding it.

As for whether this is for sale anywhere, no not yet… But I would love the chance to manufacture it, I’m trying to find a way to have it happen. If that happens I will be sure to post about it here with the REAL real pics of it, lol.

If anyone with the proper resources is interested to help it happen I’d be happy to meet you, of course.

Man, you did such a great job! I’ve always loved the classic black mage, and you created a really cool version.

Both renders are fantastic. Is there any chance you could explain your material/render set up a little? I’ve been trying hard to get a convincing airbrushed vinyl or resin material and have been unsuccessful :(. For his spell, especially, you did such a good job!

Somebody Top Row this guy! Great idea, energy and just the right amount of detail for the scene.

Sorry I didn’t read the whole thread. That looks really neat! Is that a redesign of Orco from Masters of the universe?

This kicks soooo much ass. great job!

  • BoBo

Awesome! A real treat and tease to my mind!

would you mind sharing your rendering setup? How many lights? shader settings! the image without post work!? Nice and convincing renders. Great job man! :slight_smile:

I was lazy to post comments and I believe there are far more people who like what you did. They are probably lazy too? Ha, I very much appreciate this style and really loving this character you did. nice work.

great model …
love it.

t

Good job on the Mage…would make a nice desktop sculpt

This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I was SO ready to lay out serious cash to have one of these for my desk. Way to tease!

Thanks again all,

For my render setup, there’s nothing really special to tell you, really. I just threw in 2 v-ray lights, one main white and one fill blue-ish.

BLMSetup.jpg

Just for kicks, here’s a look at the decimated mesh. 100k per piece was more than enough surface detail for this.

BLMWire.jpg

The materials are all Vray_mtl standard mat, and are just slightly reflective for the highlight, and the glossy was tweaked until it looks right. Nothing special like SSS shaders here, didn’t find I needed them for this. Of course GI is active, but I skipped AO, too dark to matter.

For the flame, again it’s just your standard mat, but made refractive this time, as the real-life material would be. All you need to do is study the real materials you want to imitate, and Vray seems to have an option to duplicate its properties. I was impressed with how easy it was with a little research on what the different fields control.

I should add that a couple parts also made use of the blend material. Specifically:
-The black painted part of the flame, is controlled by a mask on the core green material.
-The metallic paint on the body are a masked alternate material too.
-The hands use a blend between the solid paint material and translucent green plastic material.
The only reason I had to do this is because Vray seemed to bug out a lot when I tried to plug bitmaps into fields controlling reflection and refraction for some reason. The result would be really weird and unintuitive in renders. So I had to resort to using a blend material as the only solution I could find. I’m still new at this, but hey, it worked and was actually easier to tweak in the end.

All masks and colour maps were done with Polypaint, to this day my favorite texturing tool.

And for those that asked for a before/after post process view, it’s not much difference but here you go!

BLMPre-Post.jpg

As you can see, the only thing done after the raw render is a slight colour tweaking, and also DOF via the usual plugins in Photoshop.

(I will also say this, my aging machine has been pushed to its limits from these renderings. I’m due for a new rig, but times are tight!)

It’s really great seeing people excited at the idea of this thing being produced. As I said before I’m actually trying to see how I can make that happen, if it does I will definitely update with pics and details on buying a copy. I don’t intend this to be the end of this little project, I want to take it all the way to final product if possible. And I’m already thinking about what to make next, in the meantime.

Attachments

BLMSetup.jpg