AlphaProject- The Goblin

SketchFab

My first attempt was with the goblin and I'm quite happy how it turned out! There was so many possibilities with him, but I decided to pick an alchemist as his trade, it fits well with the troll market. As I was watching through the Zbrush Summit presentations, one lecturer gave a tip of using 3 phrases design for any character.

Grumpy, loner, master of his craft

So I used these three words to come up with a little bit of a character design to help me feel the character. (I have used this method for all three characters)
"Grumpy and old, nobody sure how old though, Everyday comes out of his lab, down to the market trying to sell a potion or two. Maybe it would have been easier if he wasn't such a jackass to anyone trying to buy them"
I haven't done much of 2D , I prefered to concept inside Zbrush, however I did happen to go to photoshop from time to time to have quick thoughts when I struggled

Here I wasn't sure of how will the Goblin's head look like, what will be covering it. I liked him behind bald, and having a hood, however for some time I thought about keeping the goggles.

Moving on I began sculpting the goblin starting off a sphere, my favourite way to go about in zbrush. I didn't screenshot too often in the beginning, was too into the process.
I use a mix of insert brush, extrude, and sculpting, that's all there is to it really.
 In the first few you can see me experimenting with the head gear and the ears. I thought the ears look too..boring? I can't really tell what was wrong about them.
Other thing that I threw out is the thing at the top of the backpack, it made the backpack have too much. What it was is a portable potion maker; pour ingredients on the top, pour it into the glass later; something like that.

 I was aiming for long arms, BUT NOT THAT LONG. I did shorten them up later on

So in the end I fixed proportions , the hood which I made in maya (this way I worked out a exact thickness and topology i wanted). I also had to fix the symmetry of the face. Above you can see that his eyebrow was raised a bit (helped me with giving him a feel) 

.Then I used noise feature inside Zbrush to add some cool texture to the surface of my models. Later on my friend suggested I give the Goblin a beard, so I tried it out using fibermesh and I like it a lot, gives him this old, wise and untidy look which is exactly what i aimed for. 

The face did change quite a bit through the progress. I kept coming back to it aging it, fixing proportions; just giving it a fresh eye

Using some basic polypainting I gave him some colour pretty early on, I like to do it to give the character some life, just like posing which I did when I was happy with the model.

Furthermore I added some leafs and potion vials. I spread the leafs along the string edge using the nanomesh feature , which was very helpful.  

If you look closely you will see a forearm, chain mail piece on there. I struggled with it a bit; I was using micromesh which takes a mesh and replaces another mesh's topology with that shape. I used a decimated ring (had to bear in mind that there will be several of them had to keep the poly count to minimum) and I couldn't get the orientation of it right for some time, worked out in the end! 

Final results!

Nice renders!