At first, it all starts in ZBrush by detailing the piece to look like leather, fabric, metal, etc. Texturingīecause this guy didn't have a lot of accessories, he was a fairly simple character I knew that I had to make the materials amazing to be realistic as possible. Having the base mesh head ready-to-go, I think it’s just a question of sculpting, time, feedback to get to the desired look for your face, you will have a lot of ups and downs but if you stick through enough you will always find the solution either you, your friend or your mentor. Luckily, I had Ryan Kingslien next to me who to me is probably one of the best anatomy mentors to have next to you, he really taught me a lot about the planes of the face, the skull, where the skin hangs, where do you have wrinkles, the grooves, and the lines of the face. I knew I had the outfit locked and wanted to make a realistic face and emotion that a lot of people will feel from the picture and get the idea that this is a bad guy, and he's the wrong guy to be messed with. ZBrush to me is probably 70% of my modeling time, and I rarely go into Maya to model something specific.

I push the blockout to the maximum with some folds sculpting and painting the whole character just so I can visualize it in my head. Having the concept and the PureRef scene ready-to-go, I immediately jumped into ZBrush and started with a rough blockout with primitives and extracts. At the moment, I'm part of multiple projects that are developed and outsourced by Slipgate Studios and Ophion Studios. The next year I spent mostly on studying all about the pipeline and doing some freelance projects for Indie Developers.

That was a good start but I knew deep down there is so much more about Character Art. I was sculpting characters every day for at least 5-8 hours and that lead me to become the student of the year. I decided to skip the university and go there, where at the beginning, I wanted to focus on 2D Concept Art but when I saw what you can do in ZBrush, I instantly fell In love with it.

After finishing high school and dealing with the drama about going to university, I heard about a local academy for 3D called M3DS Game Design. Since I was a little boy in school, I was always drawing and painting characters from games and movies but I never made a commitment to become an artist in any field because I was focused on basketball. Hey, 80lv, my name is Marko Lazov I’m coming from Skopje, North Macedonia, and I’ve been doing 3D Character Art since 2018.

Zbrush texture painting