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Since childhood, I’ve been a big fan of the comic books and have always tried to include some of this style
in my work. I recently had the opportunity to participate in the Comicon Challenge 2009. The challenge consisted
of creating a representation of one favorite action character of comic books, no matter if it was hero,
heroine or villain. As this is a competition specifically related to character creation for games, had some
restrictions like not being able to use more than 10k triangles in the final model and to create 2048 x 2048
texture maps.
Idea
One of the comic book and movie characters and that I have consistently followed is the Incredible Hulk. I
always wanted to make one that looks as real as the movies, but comic’s likeness. But there are so many
versions created by different artists and an equal number of representations in 3D, I thought about doing an
unusual one.
Thus was the idea of making Red Hulk, a character not well known in movies or games, but even so in
comic books? This character is an evil version of Hulk, created by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuiness (one of my
favorite comic artists) and according to them, he is more aggressive and intelligent, besides having all the
abilities of Hulk. The main difference with the original Hulk is that it does not become stronger with anger,
but rather radiates increasing levels of gamma radiation. In some editions also called Rulk to distinguish him
from the original Hulk character, but personally I prefer the original name.
Keeping all this in mind, I began searching and collecting images that I could use as a reference for creating
my own version of this strong character.
High - Poly Modeling
The first thing I do with this kind of
characters for games, is to create a
high-poly model, which later on I can
use to transfer all the geometry detail
to the texture maps.
Starting from a box and by using the
polygon editing tools, I began creating
a base mesh in Max and exported
it to an .obj file. Once inside ZBrush,
I imported this basic form and began
to move vertices with the Move brush,
looking for a more defined shape.
When I am satisfied with the overall
proportions, I retopologized it, always trying to keep a balanced number of quad polygons in the entire model’s surface. From this model I created other parts
such as the pants and hair, making a selection by using
the <CTRL> key and drawing a mask selection with the
Standard brush.
Once I made the selection (shaded in
the model) I used the Extract function to create the new
object, which is added automatically to the SubTools
panel.
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