Some fellow artists at Zynga were posting some fanasty creatures and monsters to our internal art chat, and I thought I'd make a contribution as well. The result is below. I based this off of the wonderful clay maquettes Raf Grassetti created during the preproduction of GoW... though I certainly took a few creative turns of my own. Hands for feet? Are his kicks actually punches? Yikes!

As a longtime Capcom fan, I've been really interested in what the company has been doing with its new RE Engine. In one of the company's presentations on the subject, they showed an image of a young woman that had been rendered in the engine. It was an incredibly lifelike figure, and I was particularly impressed with the expression & smile (especially for a game character). As such, I decided to do a portrait of her.

Little did I realize, this is actually the character Nico from the newly released DMC5! So, if you want to know how someone could accidentally do a fan art piece, this is it!

The game looks incredible overall, and my hats off to Capcom for developing what looks like a seriously robust engine. Can't wait to see what else they're able to do with it!

While I do a lot of 2D artwork, I'm also adept in 3D as well. In particular, I've found 3D an awesome tool for doing mock-ups and layouts that will ultimately end up in 2D. In my current work at Zynga, for example, it's pretty common that I'll generate background scenes in Maya that I'll send to our outsource team for digital paint over work. The time saving 3D provides at a base level for perspective, lighting, and form is invaluable in a deadline driven production!

As such, I'm always on the lookout for interesting ways of further integrating 3D into my 2D workflow, which is where ZBrush's 2019 release got my attention. Of course, the obvious champion of this release is the new folder system for subtools (bless you, Pixologic). However, equally touted at release are "Rendersets," which essentially put a non-photoreal filter over your sculpts. I'm generally pretty wary of these kinds of features, having encountered way too many plugins and filters that come up very short of providing the convincing results advertised ("Turn your photo into a line drawing in just one click!"). However, ZBrush's Renderset showreel looked interesting enough to try.

A while back, I had been doing a sculpt of X-Men villain Omega Red. While the sculpt never came close to completion, it was far enough along where I could use it as a guinea pig to test out the Rendersets. Particularly, based on his comics origins, could we at least get in the ball park of comic style line art?

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While I can't say I was floored by everything I tried, the results from the "B&W Thin Line" option wasn't half bad!

What really impresses me here is how nicely the filter picks up fine lines and details, like the creases around the eyes. It also does a really nice job defining areas that are still a little muddy in the sculpt, like the ears. And, there is a real distinction in line weight in contours vs internal edges. While it's not perfect, I could definitely see this being a viable base for some clean-up and tweaking in Photoshop. And, of course, it definitely makes me interested to see what the results would be from a more complete sculpt that is both more polished and created specifically with this Renderset in mind!