https://sketchfab.com/models/a48ddb7ef956462780de3c0dee0a6212/embed?autospin=1&autostart=1&preload=1&ui_theme=dark&dnt=1
The League of Legends universe has been a huge inspiration for me since I was a kid. For a very long time, I have admired the work of Riot's artists, from splash arts to animations. Today, I'm giving my best to become a part of those artists, starting with this project. When I stumbled across a tweet by Riot DEN featuring this and some other concepts, I thought the Justice Rider had a unique design that I just had to model. So, I proposed it to my teachers for my final university project. In this blog, you'll find some of my process and thoughts.
Using a front view and some anatomical references, I made 2 sketches to define the muscle groups in order to create a subtool for each one within Zbrush. For me, this is an extremely important step as it allows me to work on the character's proportions without having a sheet of turnarounds.
I made some mistakes because I didn't take into account certain deformations due to the perspective of the pose in DEN's concept sheet. In this case, the upper torso was slightly rotated to the right, causing the upper arm to appear a bit short. I used that arm as a reference and only later noticed that the left arm had the correct proportion to the height of the hip. I also ended up rotating the legs inward to make them slightly more closed.
During my seventh semester at university, I was taught blocking using zSpheres. If there's any student reading this, I don't recommend it at all because, at the time, it resulted in many problems and very limited ability to edit the shapes that make up the anatomy. This is how my project using zSpheres looked like.
As you can see, I jumped straight into sculpting muscles without achieving a good overall shape before starting to subdivide. One day, I came across a video of Savannah Shire (@savannahXYZart) sculpting Jayce Tallis for the release of Arcane, and I found her workflow to be quite clean, even avoiding the use of DynaMesh. So, I decided to give it a try, and I liked it a lot. This is how my anatomy blocking turned out using this method:
In this initial blocking, it took me about 2 hours to create each subtool and carefully analyze Savannah's process. I was amazed by the quality of shape that can be achieved with such low poly count. At the same time, I felt that I had no distractions while searching for details, and the ease with which I could edit anything that didn't feel right made me feel quite agile. Afterwards, as I started to subdivide, I achieved this final blocking:
I sculpted the body in order to use the extract function for the cloth blocking. I'm a big fan of having polygroups so that I can later use Crease by PG because I often use deformers like Polish to keep the clothing surfaces clean before sculpting. Using creases also helps maintain a defined edge when subdividing.
