Instructor Info

Nikolay Naydenov is a Senior Character Artist currently working in Gameloft. Nikolay always had deep interest in art. In his spare time he was either reading a book or scribbling on a notebook ever since he was a child. He has been in the game industry since 2007 and had worked in many projects. The project that he is most proud of is the game titled March of Empires. He loves his job as a character artist especially when he is given freedom to do his own concepting and ideas. His advice for everyone just starting out is to spend lots of time learning software programs, be efficient and fast, and also spend many hours learning the anatomy, studying faces, and muscles underneath the skin. As every profession, to be good at something, you have to practice a lot. He recommends students to always look for improvement and never settle. He believes good things require sacrifice of time and other pleasures and this can turn your passion into a profession.

Course Info 

In this course, we will go through the process of creating a cyber crocodile creature from a sphere to a finish render in Zbrush. We will start by doing the 3D sketch of our model which will allow us to change the design quickly and easily on the fly. This will be achieved by using one of the new features in Zbrush, which is Sculptris Pro. The Sculptris Pro mode will help us in the concepting stage and in the final polishing of our crocodile skin. You will learn different techniques for hardsurface modeling and mechanical parts creation. This will include Zmodeler brush, Trim Dynamic brush, and making your own Insert Multi-Mesh brush. The big part of the tutorial will be the detailed creation of crocodile scales. We will make them either by hand or using alpha brushes. In order to do that, you will learn how to make your own alpha brushes from scratch. At the end, we will make the pose for our high poly sculpt and lastly, we will export render passes which we will combine in Photoshop to achieve a nice professional looking render.