A little man, a great story

Hello everyone! This is my first project done at Skyup Academy. In this project I created a character starting from paper, passing to Clay and finally on Zbrush.

I’ll start by showing you the final renders made on Maya using Vray.

As I said, this is my first project of the masterclass in cg of Skyup Academy. The project concerns the pre-production module and the theme of this semester for the characters was European mythology.

The goal was to take a creature of European mythology and make it his own, modifying it or creating a story behind it.

I chose to make a dwarf, one of my favorite races in Norse mythology. My dwarf is called Gorm Gofran and what sets him apart is his story that I invented. Gorm is abandoned at an early age in a human village. Two newlyweds find him, the wife would like to immediately charge him but the husband is unwilling, but in the end he gets convinced. The years pass Gorm grows and the relationship with his father also grows. His father taught him his job as a blacksmith and taught him how to use the sword as he was a master of arms. Returning from a business trip, Gorm finds the village destroyed and his adoptive parents dead. Enraged he takes the hammer, the anvil that attaches to the armor and the broadsword of his father and leaves to take revenge and to prevent what happened to him from happening to someone else.

After searching for references to everything I could need, I started with the first part of the module that was about drawing the character on paper. For many years I didn’t draw anymore so it was difficult to start again, but also very funny.

Finished drawing it was time to get his hands dirty and create the character using the Monster Clay. It was the first time I did such a thing and it was really very interesting to work with such a material and see my drawing take three-dimensional shape.

With this part of the module finished as well, it was time to recreate and improve the sculpture on Zbrush. It was my first time sculpting digitally, it was not easy but I am happy with the work I did being the first time. I would like to share with you all the creative and improvement process on Zbrush and I will do it below.

Finished this first blockout, I didn't like how I approached the armor so I decided to redo it and tried to keep a simpler style that I thought looked better on my character.

Happy with the armor it was time to pose my character, add clothes, objects and details. I decided to keep the same pose that I used in both the drawing and clay sculpture. Although not very dynamic it gives the idea of someone determined and directed toward a specific place which was exactly what I wanted.

I also leave close-up images so you can see the details better.

Once finished sculpting it was time to illuminate and render the sculpture. We used Maya with the Vray rendering engine, I did three light setups but in the end I opted for white lights and a high constrast to give drama to the image

With this last part I finished the presentation of my first project, if you have reached this point I thank you for your attention and I hope it was interesting , high five and comment if you want, also the feedback is welcome. See you at the next project.