ZBrushCentral

Sam Williams - Costume Concept Models

Hello ZBC, here are some renders of the Enfys Nest model I sculpted during Solo. I’m slowly getting permission to put up some of the stuff I’ve been working on for the last few years, I’ll post it all up here one day, hopefully.

I’ve been working on Star Wars as the costume concept modeller since The Force Awakens, I’m basically the go between for the 2D concept artists and the 3D CAD guys, pretty much all the stormtroopers, helmets and a large portion of costume hardware comes through me. Most of the troopers and high volume armour elements get remodelled in nurbs from my low poly meshes by the CAD guys but often the more sculptural models I split into mouldable parts for printing myself. A lot of the rebel gear is made by hand practically in the workshop using drawings and profiles sliced from the models, there’s a really nice mix of talent in our dept.

I’m posting Enfys because she was a highlight for me as far as the texture reference was concerned, not to mention a top design by Glyn Dillon and Dave Crossman that was a pleasure to work on. I had a found sheep skull which I used photographs of to generate alphas for brushes as well as some high res 3D scans using a FAROarm scanner. I used this data to project the geometry through onto the main model. All this was printed.

All the 3D printing is outsourced to 3Dsystems and is in high quality SLA, it’s then moulded and vacuum cast in a urethane in-house.

About 95% of my workflow is zBrush, especially since pixologic introduced Live Booleans. Occasionally I need to use Rhinoceros3D for some of the more precise technical fixings and hardware.

This render is keyshot.

I’m putting stuff slowly up on instagram. If any of you are interested you can see more there as I get it approved: https://www.instagram.com/aristotles.lantern/

Cheers!

-Sam




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Here’s a few more from Solo, This is the RangeTrooper.

I did these renders for the workshop and breakdown dept to get an idea of colour and texture for the helmets.

This was a great exercise to learn keyshot’s labels and material graph as much as I could. There’s a bit of colour correction in photoshop but otherwise it’s a straight render.

Designed by costume designers Glyn Dillon and Dave Crossman.

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Here’s the Mimban Trooper. First image is all a keyshot render too. Some of the mud is actual geo but the rest is all material graph work. The only Photoshop is colour correction.

Designed by Glyn Dillon/Dave Crossman. It’s based on the original Stormtrooper helmet I did with them on Rogue One.

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Here’s Kylo

Back in the day when there was no such thing as zRemesher, panel loops or booleans. I don’t know how I used to cope.

In the model the muzzle appears to be bigger than what you might be used to. This was because after filming a test scene with Adam, JJ reduced the size of it which is what you see in the majority film. However, the test scene made it to the final cut too and you can see the original unaltered muzzle in the interrogation between Kylo and Poe.

Costume Designer was Micheal Kaplan and Glyn Dillon was the concept artist.

The last two images are of a plasticine model that Glyn initially worked up and then a subsequent mirrored 3D scan of it to use as a reference for the proper sculpt.

This was also when I still worked in the workshop so I was responsible for cleaning up the print and I still knew how to mould things! This may be the last thing I ever moulded I think?!

The castings were vac cast urethane, then chromed and the final paint job was by the super talented Toby Hawkes.

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Incredible! Thanks for sharing these. I love the design for Enfys Nest. I was wishing for good still images of the helmet :slight_smile: Thanks for sharing!

-Joseph

Thanks Joesph!!

I hadn’t realized that the base of the Enfys Nest helmet was a skull. Very cool to have little details like that!

Outstanding. Thank you for sharing all of these images and giving information into the development of these helmets. Great stuff.

Thankyou so much guys!

aurick… Glyn and I imagined conceivably it could be different skulls held together with the techno-tubes perhaps? Maybe the regular nature of the forehead came from an augmented or genetically modified creature?! making up the stuff behind these things is more than half the fun.

“Back in the day when there was no such thing as zRemesher, panel loops or booleans. I don’t know how I used to cope.”

I just got into ZBrush a week, or so, ago and I am very happy to have missed those days. :smiley:

I too had no idea Enfys Nest’s Helmet was a skull! Great to see these all up close and know they were using a Zbrush/ Keyshot workflow to some degree.
Thank you for sharing.
~j

Thanks so much for sharing!. That Enfys Nest helmet is killer!

Thanks for your messages. And thanks ZBC for Top Row!! Always been a bit of a dream to be up there with all the amazing artists you promote. It’s a real honour.

Hi Sam!

I only registered to say how much I admire your work!

It’s so great to see all the details in the designs, that is just not visible on the big screen.

How does the pipeline work? Is Glyn really sitting at the computer building all the stuff, or does he make scribbles and someone else is building it?

Hey, thankyou!

The way it usually works is Glyn explores ideas in 2D, then once he’s happy (and if it’s needed) he gets approval from grown ups, he then passes that to me and I work quite quickly and block it out on my own in 3D in zBrush over a day or two.

Before I get too far into the process I then bring him over and he literally sits in a chair next to me, spins the model and looks at my 3D interpretation of his 2D. I have a little notebook he’ll sketch ideas in while I work them into model and we’ll change stuff, tweak the shapes or explore different paths.

To do the detailing I give him screenshots and save viewport angles… he’ll go back to his computer and draw over the top of them and then I’ll match them on the model.

It’s fun!

Yes, sounds like fun. :slight_smile:

The grownups are the director and/or the producers, I guess? (love the term “Grownups”!)

Is it more tedious or more quick to reach a greenlit design? Some stuff looks like a no-brainer (Mudtrooper) and some
stuff looks like it must have been weeks in development-hell (Enfys Nest).

It is obvious, that you guys try to get a certain lineage in the costumes and reuse quite some stuff. So I not only saw
Jyn Ersos “Head-Lamp-Gear-whatchamacallit” at the back of the head of the AT-ACT Driver for instance, but also Jyn Ersos shoebuckles
on the knees and the shoretrooper-shoulderbuckles at the heels of the Rangetrooper. Is that something you decide on in
the planning stage or is that left to whoever actually builds the costumes?

And another thing: Was the color of the Rangetrooper visor changed from orange to gold somewhere down the line?

Hey again ZBC. Thread Bump I guess!

I fancied a bit of texturing practice over some lunchtimes so I revived one of my old models from Rogue One.

The textured version was done last week in substance, but I thought you might be interested to see the original zBrush version I split up for 3D Print.

Entirely modelled in zBrush. Working to a 0.25mm tolerance fit by measuring gaps with the transpose line…you know how it is!

This was back in the 4r7 (I think? - 2015 days). Long before live booleans and zmodeller. It’s funny looking back at a model you did 5 years ago, if you can I recommend it - see how far you’ve developed in that time! still, thought it might be interesting to show it. I’ll see if I can get the Shoretrooper and Deathtrooper too.


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Love seeing these Sam! Thanks for sharing,

-Joseph

Top notch work! :trophy: Keep’em coming @AristotlesLantern
Jaime

Cheers guys!

Here’s a retextured ShoreTrooper. Again, the zBrush images are my 5 year old original model! I should have some stuff from IX to post up soon. There’s a fair bit in the Art of Book which just got released.

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