For a while now, I’ve been wanting get back to my illustration roots and take the tabletop miniatures I’ve been sculpting and render them using the NPR filters in ZBrush to create a cool traditional looking fantasy illustration. It’s been about a year on and off of tinkering with the BPR filter settings when I could and I finally got something out of it that I could use. So I decided to finally test it out.
I’m the type of person that needs an example to shoot for, so I obviously picked Frazetta’s style to try to emulate. Dramatic lighting with shadow details almost not visible but with brush stokes fairly visible. I had to make a separate set of filters for each pass then layered them in Affinity Photo and then painted masks for where each layer would show thru and overlap the others. Affinity Photo has a decent brush system so I used mixer brushes to soften edges and add more painterly effects to achieve the style.
I wish I did more for the background, but this was mainly a test for workflow. But I’m pretty happy with the results and where this direction will go in the future. This was rendered from the Goblin King miniature I sculpted for the Anime Dungeons kickstarter.
Pass 1 - Sketch Layer - Mostly used for the outline. Not much of the shading came thru.
Pass 2 - A Burnt Sienna like color for the base wash layer. I turned off shadows and specular highlights for this one.
Pass 3 (BaseWash2)- Another Burnt Sienna layer. I tried to capture a rough painterly effect with this layer.
Pass 4 - Yet another Burnt Sienna layer. This one with stronger shadows and a tighter painterly effect for the more focused and better lit areas.
Pass 5 - Simple color pass.
Pass 6 - Background pass.
Pass 7 - Specular highlight pass. I painted over some of the highlights that were in the other passes, so I used this to bring them back.
