ZBrushCentral

Comicon Challenge 2008 - Winners Gallery

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We’re back with more coverage of the Game Artisans Comicon Challenge! Each of the five winners has kindly put together an assortment of images from their entry WIPs, along with a little bit more info about their thoughts and processes in creating these top-flight characters.

So we are pleased to put together a Hero’s Gallery (or in some cases, Rogue’s Gallery), featuring some of the very best game models around.

Enjoy!

[attach=108641]Brutikong Beauty[/attach]

Rocksteady is a villain from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. My goal was to re-imagine the character as a more aggressive, sadistic and disfigured mutation, yet not stray so far from the original design that he’d not be immediately recognizable. I wanted him to be as bad-assed to me now as the original was to me as a child.

I wanted to play up the human punk side of the character, so he has more facial jewelry, concert shirt for The Clash, and the rock buckle. His right arm has been branded with the symbol of the Shredder like ranchers brand their cattle, signifying that he is subservient to the Foot Clan.

There was so much more I wanted to do with the character but the deadline restrained me. He is missing his machine gun… I left space in my UV layout for it, but didn’t have time to complete it.

I modeled everything in 3DS Max and sculpted in ZBrush. It was rendered with Mental Ray, and textures were painted in Photoshop.

[attach=108642]Brutikong Composite[/attach]

[attach=108643]ElScorcho Beauty[/attach]

As cheesy as it sounds I was inspired to join the contest by all the awesome entries that where already in progress. Watching guys like MM, Brutikong, onelung, rawkstar and so many others produce bad-assed WIPs made me decide to enter despite being pretty late.

I’ve had a Gunslinger Spawn figure for some time now and I’ve wanted to model him or something like him for a while. Since I’d never gotten around to it for some reason, this contest gave me the nudge I needed to just model him already! As cool as the original designs were, I felt he could’ve used some more spice. So I looked up some references for him and decided to mix and match elements from the comics and the action figure. I also chose to design some elements of my own, which were meant to lead the viewer’s eye and add a bit of realism.

I particularly enjoy sculpting, so I intentionally made the base geometry from Max especially simple. His howdy buckle for example started as a simple plane and the skulls on his boots were basically cylinders. To make the low poly I used a combination of the original base geometry, optimized meshes from Polygon Cruncher and some custom geometry from Max. The texturing was just some good old Photoshop and Crazybump.

Big thanks to Fred and everyone who make these contests possible. They’re a great way for aspiring artists to learn and grow.

[attach=108644]ElScorcho Composite[/attach]

[attach=108645]One-Lung Beauty[/attach]

I’m inspired by other artists who are always getting better and raising the bar. Dudes who can do this without a computer.

I chose to remake the Penguin because I wanted to take the most unintimidating villain, push him extremely dark, and make him Batman’s most formidable opponent. I created him with ZBrush, Max, and Photoshop.

Special thanks to my amazing girlfriend, Letty for putting up with me during this challenge, and to my dog for getting ignored. My parents for supporting and believing in me. My CG brothers Justin Albers and Kiel Figgins, who are always busting out awesome stuff, and who always make time to rip on my stuff. All the peeps on GameArtisans.org for all the great feedback, and FredH for the great competitions. Ex Midway Austin character crew, and the original KingsIsle Entertainment art team. Lastly, my greatest teacher and mentor YemYam (aka Peter Hayes).

[attach=108646]One-Lung Composite[/attach]

[attach=108647]RedRepublik Beauty[/attach]

I have always had an affinity for comic books, and this contest gave me a chance to create one of my favorite characters: Darkseid. My biggest challenge was translating his simple design into a compelling 3D game character. Throughout the process I thought about redesigning him with a more updated look, but the paintovers never got me as excited as the original. Instead, I chose to embrace the classic Darkseid costume, and focused on the form and stylization of the character.

I created my base mesh in ZBrush using ZSpheres, and sculpted in the major details. When I was happy with the overall form, I retopologized the character and started adding smaller details. When I reached the poly limit that my computer could handle, I broke the mesh up by using Tool:small_orange_diamond:Geometry:small_orange_diamond:GrpSplit and added my final details on the new meshes. After a quick coat of color with PolyPaint, it was off to 3DS Max to create the low poly, XNormal for the normal maps, and Photoshop for the final textures. I did some shader work in Max to get the comic book feel that I was shooting for.

I would like to thank all of the people that posted on my thread and gave me feedback and encouragement along the way. I would also like to thank Fred for putting on yet another great contest for Game Artisans. I can’t wait for Comicon 2…

[attach=108648]RedRepublik Composite[/attach]

[attach=108649]DiegoMaia Beauty[/attach]

Hi all! I decided to be part of the Comicon challenge because I LOVE the theme! I began to study drawing by copying some of my favorite comic artists, and my favorite one is Joe Mad. So that’s why I chose to work with his style on this piece. I picked Captain America because he’s really an awesome character! He has a strong personality and he doesn’t talk too much these days before smashing his enemies!

I tried to keep true to his spirit on my 3D model; especially with my final pose. I didn’t want to make a simple pose, but rather chose to make an illustration. So I tried to show some action and highlight my topology working correctly as well. I was inspired by one of Joe’s illustrations to do this shot.

I used XSI, 3DS Max, UVLayout, ZBrush 3 and Xnormal in my process. I think that the coolest thing about low poly models is to see all the maps working together in real-time. That’s actually the only point I didn’t like in the contest: I don’t think we should render the models. We should see all the problems like UV seams and projection problems.
But I’m very happy with the number of great works we could see in the contest! Unfortunately the forum can’t give prizes to everyone who made a good work.

I’d like to thank Fred and everybody else from Game Artisans, and congratulate all the winners of the contest! It was very fun!!! Thanks everybody!

[attach=108650]DiegoMaia Composite[/attach]

Comicon-Icon.jpg

Attachments

Comicon-Banner.jpg

brutikong_1.jpg

brutikong_2.jpg

ElScorcho_1.jpg

ElScorcho_2.jpg

Onelung_1.jpg

Onelung_2.jpg

RedRepublik_1.jpg

RedRepublik_2.jpg

DiegoMaia_1.jpg

DiegoMaia_2.jpg

Cool read, and great work :+1:

Go GA! :sunglasses:

Awesome, I love them all…The Penguin is my favourite out of them all, mainly because it’s my kinda style. Well done to all…:slight_smile:

Impressive work all round. :+1:

Yea, top knotch work from everyone! Congratulations Artist - I hope these bring you success, beyond the execution, which is clearly rewarding with results like these.

-Shea

Nice work -> Congratulations Artist ;o)

wow awesome job. congrats to the artists

Wow! these were all great! excellent job to all!

Belated congratulations to all ZBC members who participated!
First time I´m in this forum oops. :slight_smile:
Amazing entrys all over the place!

well done guys,what a shame the spawn artwork was the best one,deserved first place.

I’m from GA as well, but we need to update this thread 2009, these are last year’s winners. Also Uneathly Challenge will probably be announced in March, at least that’s the plan :slight_smile: