Introduction - Hi, my name is Eoin Cannon, I’m from Australia and this is a brief overview of how I created my image “Cohen the Barbarian” using 3ds Max, ZBrush, Photoshop and Fusion. My motivation for the piece was just to get some practice modeling and to have some fun in the process by recreating a character from Terry Practhett’s Discworld novel series. My goal is, one day do a 3D modeling professionally so I was also trying to achieve something at least a bit technically challenging and visually pleasing for my portfolio. My inspiration for the look and pose was taken totally from Paul Kidby’s magnificent illustrations in the Discworld novella “The Last Hero” by Terry Practhett. I’ve skimmed over a few parts in the process, particularly texturing, because I didn’t really do much out of the ordinary and didn’t do it particularly well in this case.
Modeling - I approached the modeling in a few ways. For the anatomy I started with a basemesh from Max and sculpted in ZBrush, then created displacement maps. For some costume elements I sculpted the basic shape in ZBrush and then retopologised in Max and discarded the sculpt. For a few hard surface objects I modeled completely in Max.
To model Cohen’s body I started with a human base mesh that I had created for another character. It doesn’t matter too much that the body type is completely different; it’s easy to change everything in ZBrush.
After moving everything around and trying to get a more stylised look I have this. It will be refined as I sculpt at higher levels but the proportions are more like what I’m looking for. Using the transpose tools in ZBrush, it is easy to bend a model into the pose you are looking for. I’ve started to try and make Cohen look older and saggier, but also wiry and tough. The pose is pretty much taken straight from Paul Kidby’s illustration. It will be tweaked as the costume is added.
After getting the pose fairly close to what I am looking, I exported the base level of the model from ZBrush as an .obj and did my UVW mapping in Max. I used standard techniques for this, cylinder mapping and then tweaking for the most part. Some use of pelt mapping. I actually created three copies of the model, each with different mapping, one for the head, legs and torso. I exported the meshes to ZBrush and by deleting the parts that weren’t mapped I ended up with three separate meshes of the head, torso and legs. Having separate meshes enabled me to subdivide each one quite a lot without running out of memory. I then sculpted more of the fine detail one each piece, keeping in mind which parts would be covered with costume.
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