

Making of Fred the Mushroom



by Aleks Kirilenko, Estonia

Introduction

This work was created during Kris Costa’s online workshop that I took some time ago. The main idea was to make a human-like creature with emphasize on anatomy, realism and character’s expression. Since I never make any kind of sketches for my personal work, I left the design of the model unfold as I went with it. That’s probably the main reason why some of the models that I made for myself took me so long to complete: I constantly add new elements, tweak things, remove things etc. etc. to a point when I pretty much just tell myself to stop and be done with the darn thing. In this case, however, I knew several things from the start: it would be a blend of a mushroom and a human, the character would be old, it would have a “calm and gentle” look to it opposed to something aggressive and evil. Because of those three things, gathering references were fairly easy – I looked for old Chinese people. Here are some of the examples of what I randomly found on the internet.





Sculpting Usually I start my models with a pre made base mesh, that I have plenty of, to save some time and bypass the hustle of creating a new one. This time around I decided to start from scratch. Thanks to DynaMesh, the decision on how to approach the creation of the base mesh was easy to make: I went with ZSpheres.

For all my sculpting work I use the technique I picked up from Zack Petroc many years ago by watching one of his DVDs. The idea is quite simple: start from the very first subdivision level and slowly move up putting as much form and detail into every level as possible. I know many people who would subdivide a model up to almost a million of polygons and only then start sculpting, but there is no right or wrong ways about it. Use whatever method you are comfortable with and gets the job done. I prefer the “start from low” method better because I feel I have a lot more control over what I do this way. Plus, if you are working on a piece of cloth for example, by sculpting on low subdivision levels and then going up, some “happy accidents” happen when after the subdivision process I notice a new form or a fold in places where before there was just a mess of polygons that barely showed anything interesting. I use Clay Buildup brush for 90% of all my sculpting work. ZBrush has tons of neat little brushes but the Standard and Clay Buildup are usually my weapons of choice. Slowly but surely using those two brushes I got to a point when I was somewhat happy with the model. Also at that point I introduced some asymmetry to the model and made the face expression that was perfect for what I had in mind for the character. When I was making the model, there hadn’t been no ZRemesher yet, so all the retopologizing work was done in TopoGun. I have used this piece of software for several years now and find it to be pretty much perfect for my needs. From time to time I use 3ds MAX’s Graphite modeling tools to help me retopo a model, but it’s mostly when I make something mechanical where I need better control and precision.





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