ZBrushCentral

My Cartoon Character Alphabet Challenge

Was looking at some of the older posts on this forum and seen one that i thought was an awesome idea. Basically the artist set himself a challenge to make a cartoon animal for evey letter of the alphabet.

I Thought that would be a good way to improve on one specific thing, so i set myself the challenge of making a cartoon character for every letter.

I have a list but im still 3 short, so if anyone can think of a cartoon character beginning with Q, U and X would be a great help. Also looking for hefty criticism and hopefully some positive feedback and any advice on modelling cartoon characters.

Not doing them in any order, also just trying to stay with the original look, so here’s the first low poly mesh

FRED FLINTSTONE

Fred Flintstone Low Poly.jpg

How about:

Quickdraw McGraw
Underdog

Good thinking, i forgot about quickdraw mcgraw, just leaves X

Got my Fred Flintstone Ready for sculpting, hows he lookin so far?

Fred Flintstone Low Poly Fin.jpg

Not quite sure how to say this, but it’s not quite the Fred I remember…

Here’s a picture that a quick google search found:
(included here for instructional purposes only)

Fred-Flintstone.jpg

Almost 3 heads tall. The Shirt is on both shoulders with the “tie” across the neck. The big legs taper a bit down to the feet, which are almost as wide as the head (from end of nose to back of skull). This would be a great way to “break in” the units feature of TransPose.

It may be best to worry about the proportions, before dealing with the hair and clothes. But that’s just how I roll.

You do have a good idea of how to approach digital sculpting, aside from the proportions issues, the base mesh looks solid enough to be an excellent start for a 'toon sculpt.

The only X character I can think of is Dr. Xaiver from the X-Men cartoon (thinking about the Evolution version).

Am looking forward to seeing what you do with your project! :+1:

Hey man, i did realise the pic i had was a bit different, but i figured f*ck it, i already started. This is actually the first time iv tried to add clothes or hair to a model, really just experimenting to try and figure it out.

Gonna go back to him tomorrow, but here he is so far. Colour was just a quickie to see how he would look.

A bit of colour.jpg

What would be the best way to do the hair, as a seperate mesh or sculpted out the head?

Probably gonna put his actual clothes on him as well.

this looks very cute…

There are brushes in Zbrush you can change the shape with after you’ve started. The model is far from illustration shown above. Same is with hair. Have a closer look at the design of Fred’s clothes.

This is the drawings i’m using for reference, found them on the net, sketches that someone done. As you can see the clothing in this drawing is not the original clothing. However i am going to go back to the start and totally try again starting with my base i used for this one.

Really struggling with the hair, does anyone have any advice on how i can sculpt it outta the body mesh, or am i better adding a subtool?

Add a Zsphere as a subtool, and then use Zsketch to create the hair.

Chris.

I’d use a subtool, too.

Iv taken a little step back from Fred just now, gonna go back to him soon.

Moving on with my challenge, i modelled a really simple cartoon man base mesh in blender, gonna use it for a cartoon take on some of my favourite comic book characters, i figured comic book characters would fit in with this challenge as they all have been in cartoons.

Starting with Spiderman

Been using muscle charts as reference for this, im happy with the proportions iv got, made him quite slim, but ripped, gave him a big head, and only 3 fingers and a thumb. gonna start adding some costume detail at Sub-Division level 4 (Bottom Pic). Was gonna make his eyes really big (Ultimate Spiderman style).

Let me know what you think so far.

Also heres a pic of where it started.

Cartoon Spiderman.jpg

Attachments

Sub Lev 4.jpg

Nice start. The proportions of the body looks fine.

BTW, I’m working on a story about super-heroes and have made similar decisions about the cartoon anatomy as you have (4-5 heads tall body, 3 fingers, etc…) so I understand what you seem to be doing.

Your hands look good, but I think that making them a bit bigger could help with “readability” in that the silhouette would be more defined for the hands and the distortion of proportion would be more clearly deliberate to the viewer. Also it’s a cartoon! So go crazy and see what happens.

@ Mike Rhodes - hey man, what kinda story you workin on, is it an animation or a comic strip. Resized the hands, and i agree, it does look better.

Was also gonna use my base mesh to model Wolverine and Iron Man

Hands resized.jpg

This whole challenge has gone tits up, started the Train2Game Artist and Animators course a few weeks back and kinda been neglecting Zbrush.

The course however has been really good so far, the products they use are 3ds Max, Maya and Photoshop all supplied for you by Train2Game, its open learning, so you study from home and is available to anyone in the UK over 17

http://forum.train2game.com/

the above link is the T2G Forum, anyone interested can get more info there.

As i’ve been learning Max on the course i’ve taken a big step back from everything i was doing before, Zbrush, Blender etc and went right back to basics. Hopefully as i progress i can intergrate Zbrush for the creation of normals maps., and produce some nice game models to show off on here.

Also really want to do a proper game model of my Spider-man i started in the above posts.

Done this for a 2d to 3d bust challenge, base mesh done in blender, sculpted and polypaint in Zbrush 4. The hair, t-shirt and teeth are sub-tools.

shaggy2.jpg

Cool … Shaggy … scooby dooby doooooo!
Used to watch that cartoon a lot as kid … where did time go?
:+1:

this is a cool shaggy ;]

shagy color copy.jpg