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Stupid Introduction
Greets everyone! My name is Yaroslav Primachenko and in this “making of” I will tell you about my last 3D work called “A zombie in the closet”. The idea for this work came to me after watching some zombie movies and playing the brilliant “Zombies vs plants” game – why do zombies are always composed of parts taken from the same species, it’s so boring! These cute creatures sure deserve more, so I decided to make my own zombie and make it more creative by combining parts of the different living (or should I say dead?) beings. So I draw a character called Franky – a younger brother of the famous Frankenstein monster. A freak and an outcast, hated and despised by his own family for being a vegetarian and preferring broccoli to brains. Nobody ever wrote any books or shoot movies about him – his existence was a disgrace to all of his relatives. Well, there’s a skeleton in everyone’s closet, you know.
At first I wanted to make a more realistic looking image with less saturated colors, but quickly changed my mind after drawing a sketch. I didn’t want to lose all the opportunities that a more cartoony approach gave me – like Franky sitting on his tale as if on the rocking chair, or using so deformed proportions. I tried to create a zombie that everyone would want as a pet and would love to feed with all the staff the zombies love to eat (brains?).
Super Modeling
I started with Zspheres in ZBrush 3.1 – great tool especially now in version 4. With the Zspheres I seeked for the right proportions then turned them into an editable mesh and started defining the geometry. Then I exported it into 3ds max and made some fixes where needed – cleaning the geometry and refining it even more (without and with turbosmooth on). I also unwrapped the model to make it ready for texturing. After that I exported it back into ZBrush, divided it a few times and started working on some fine geometry. It was exactly the time I started feeling a bit stupid as it turned out to be rather difficult to combine all the different parts and yet make them look organic and natural. It was a series of experimenting, trying this and that, exploring human and animal anatomy and thinking how to apply it to my zombie and make it look believable. Then I divided the model even more and started adding all the different wrinkles – my favorite part of the work. I used free alphas from the zbrushcentral – really awesome staff, and also created some from the iguana photos - for the cheeks and the back of my zombie creature. That’s the real fun, it’s only texturing that I like more!
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