ZBRUSH | BLENDER | MAYA | ARNOLD | PHOTOSHOP
Learn professional, efficient techniques to breathe life into your characters and take your digital sculpting to the next level
In my most recent work, I’ve had the great honour to serve as a lead cinematic character artist on Blizzard’s Diablo IV. In that role, I worked on some of the game’s highest fidelity and performanceheavy characters, such as the villainous antagonist Lilith.
In this tutorial, I’m going to run you through the process I followed for creating another demonic character, namely Helena, my award-winning personal project. She was created for Rafael Grassetti’s underworld-themed character sculpting contest and chosen as one of the winners.
I’ll go over each key step of the process it took to create Helena from start to finish. Beginning from an initial 3D sketch using blockin methods, and then refining the shapes and ideas in order to achieve a more realistic, dynamic character, we’ll look at how you can take an early concept and begin developing it into a strong, believable character packed full of story and emotion.
You can follow along and try to replicate each step of the process, but in order to get the full benefit of the workshop I recommend coming up with your own spin or idea for a character or creature along the way, while keeping it aligned to a similar theme. This is because in order to truly become a stronger character artist, you must learn to actively think and develop your own ideas and backstory for your character while you sculpt.
It’s an organic process where you try grounding your character in a certain theme, setting, or timeframe as you work, and the ideas constantly change and evolve as you get further into the development of your character. You’ll find yourself questioning a lot of the design and choices you make, and ultimately as you get further along, the backstory and facets of your character will solidify into a cohesive and believable language that brings both life and story to them.
This process is just as important as any other part of the modelling workflow, as it grounds your characters and their designs into a much more believable concept, and ultimately a stronger entity. That being said, you should be able to follow along and use the same techniques, workflows, and steps taken in order to create a believable character, whether you decide to recreate Helena or put your own twist into a variant underworldthemed character.
