SHINOBI PROJECT SCULPT VERSION

ARTIST

Dylan Kowalski SOFTWARE

Zbrush, Marvelous Designer, Substance Painter, Maya, Arnold, Photoshop

This highly detailed sculpt amounted to two to three months of work for freelance 3D artist Dylan Kowalski. The project provided Kowalski with an opportunity to broaden his Zbrush skill set and hone his high-poly sculpting. “It was a lot of experimentation, testing and of course, a lot of retakes on almost every part,” he explains.

Kowalski embraced all of the tricks and techniques in his arsenal for this graceful character. The clothes were created in Marvelous Designer, giving Kowalski a good base to work with in Zbrush. “I decided not to make crazy simulated clothes,” he adds, “it was better for me to build a kind of block mesh that could be detailed later in Zbrush, it took less time and gave me better control at the end.”

Zbrush’s Zremesher was a particularly useful tool for Kowalski as he worked on the character. “It’s a wonderful tool,” he says, “you can get pretty decent geometry if you combine the projection tool and the Zremesher, you don’t need to use a retopology software.”

Ultimately detail was at the very heart of the project. “I was always thinking about how far I could go to put details everywhere. How to make it the right way without being overkill.” All of the character’s impressive details were made in Zbrush, with Kowalski using different techniques to build a complete set of displacement alphas, which could then be extracted on every part of the model.