In an effort to practice modeling more male characters, I flipped through some of my many movie art books for inspiration. That’s when I found this alternate character design for Joe Gardner from Disney/Pixar’s Soul by Pixar Character Artist Ed Bell. I loved this “Kareem Abul Jabbar type” design as soon as I saw it and love that Ed thought to pull from him as inspiration! Ed’s illustration jumped out at me as someone who just knew jazz!
I challenged myself on this personal project to work on the larger shapes and geometry rather than taking it all the way to completely textured. Sometimes you need a modeling project that is just for modeling and not for goal post moving – a challenge that requires you to stay in one lane. This was great for that and I’m really please with how it turned out.
This was a really great project to stretch my legs in an area I want to practice more in – I’m glad I had such great character design to use as reference!
Process
Since I wanted this to be a quick challenge project, I didn’t waste too much time on figuring out how I was going to jump into the nitty gritty. But I DID take a moment to find some additional references to help guide me.
I’m a ZBrush and Maya girly. I can’t lie – tis how I started out my modeling journey. So I really loved the idea of using ZBrush polygroups to get the shape and face just right. While I wasn’t planning to animate the bust when the model was complete, I did try to consider how the faces should be set up for animating.
This video below, while long, is a satisfying watch, I think 🙂 BUT I must warn, that the ZBrush progress recording wasn’t the best on this day, so there’s a decent amount of flickering. I’m not sure if it’s capable of causing seizures, but want to put that warning out there, just in case.
