Hello everyone, been a bit since I’ve posted anything, but that’s due to us all being hard at work on Doom Eternal. I wanted to take a moment and share some of our work from the title.
First and foremost, I would like to take a second and thank the Character team for being the awesome gents that they are! It’s a real honor to work with artists as professional and passionate as the team at Id Software. I just hit my 10-year mark and it’s been a blast. Time sure does fly!
When starting out on Eternal, we wanted to take a different direction than Doom 2016. We wanted to punch the designs up and push them a bit. We headed for a more Saturday morning cartoon vibe. More color, bolder style, brighter blood and in your face. We really wanted to pay homage to the classic iconic designs of Doom I and II. A good part of us are from the 80/90s gen, so you can’t help but see the references in the colors and designs. Saturday morning cartoons, 80s horror, its influences are all over Eternal, its dripping with it. There was a good bit of figuring all of that out in the 2d concept phase as well as the 3d. What worked in 2d, sometimes was a bit tricky to science out in 3d space, but we made it work. My hat is off to the excellent concept team at Id Software, they really went the extra mile.
Once again, Zbrush was instrumental to our pipeline, more so now than ever. In the past, most of us would traditional poly-model the majority of all hard surfaces. This go around we completely made the switch to 100% Zbrush. We used it for all modeling-related tasks. With the additions and iterations to both Zmodeler and Zremesher, there was no going back. At first it was a bit different wrapping our heads around the toolset, but once you stick with it, it clicks. The majority of all hard-surface was done with Zmodeler and Dynamic subdiv. We would use those tools to hit clean shapes and major forms, but keep it simple and clean. Eventually, we would apply the subdiv and use a variety of brushes for panel lines and details. Early on in the project, we were Zmodeling a lot more than we found we had to. Nothing wrong with this method, it gives you very clean results, but we found it more time-consuming and tedious. We decided to move to brushes for all the details and keep the major manifolds as basic as possible. Not only did this speed up our process, but we found it all the more enjoyable to experiment with. It was faster and easier to try differnt shapes, lines and details. It was a major boost all around. Like I said, no going back. Not every piece was made with Zmodeler either. Depending on the shape we needed, sometimes we would sculpt it, extract it, and Zremesh it. Having those two approaches to modeling is extremely powerful and you use the right tool when it makes the most sense. Another honorable mention is Boolean, we didn’t use it all the time, but it’s extremely useful when used properly. Symbols, engravings, complex shapes, you name it, it can do it. All in all, the move to Zbrush for all modeling tasks just made our lives so much easier. No more importing and exporting, having everything under one roof was a huge advantage. Its been a pleasure and a massive thanks to the team at Pixologic!
Enough words for now, here is some of my work from Eternal. The team will follow up with their individual contributions.
All HD full-res images can be found here:
my Arstation
The Marauder! This was a fun one and everyone’s favorite pain in the ass! Concept, Emerson Tung
The Wintherin! Concept, Emerson Tung
The Dreadknight! Concept, Jon Lane
The Mancubus! Everyone’s favorite Big Boi! Modeling/texturing myself, heart model by Peter Boehme. Concept, Alex Palma
The Cyber Mancubus! Concept, Alex Palma
The Prowler! Base modeling/texturing, myself, additonal detailing and texturing by Emanuel Palalic, final 4k texture pass, myself. Concept, Hugo Martin
The Imp! This has touched a few hands. Body model by Brett Briley, an evolution of a previous Kenneth Scott iteration. Head model/texture and body texture, myself. Additional modeling and texture update Emanuel Palalic. Final 4k texture pass, myself. Eternal concept pass, Alex Palma
The Arachnotron! Concept, Alex Palma
The Pinky! Concept, Hugo Martin
The Khan Maykr! Concept, Alex Palma
The Hellknight! Concept, Alex Palma
Talk about the ID team!!! All heavy hitters in my book and have been for quite sometime 
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