The best digital art from the CG community

SOCIAL  DISTANCING

ARTIST Gregg Hartley

SOFTWARE ZBrush, Blender, Marvelous Designer, Megascans, Redshift, Cinema 4D, Photoshop

Freelance 3D artist Gregg Hartley took time each day over two weeks to create this compelling character piece. “This was one of those times I just went with the flow,” Hartley explains. He began with a sphere in ZBrush and kept modelling until a creature took shape. Hartley took inspiration from his surroundings during the COVID-19 lockdown as well as images he gathered on PureRef.

Although he enjoys sculpting in ZBrush, Hartley feels most comfortable developing parts like the flute and the patterns on the creature’s gauntlets in Blender. Identifying his camera angles helped Hartley to work on the composition, flow and folds of the cloth in Marvelous Designer, which he wanted to use to guide the viewer’s eye.

ZBrush’s FiberMesh tool allowed Hartley to create the fur and the creature’s eyebrows. “I purchased the hairbrushes pack from ZBrush Guides and it made combing easier and fun,” he adds. After texturing in Substance Painter and layout in Cinema 4D were complete, Hartley decided to test out Redshift. “Redshift has a great effect for atmospheric perspective,” he explains, “this came in handy for composition and gave it a cool hue. I was able to pop the greens and reds elsewhere while having fast visual feedback of my z-depth within the viewport.”

● artofgregg.artstation.com

MIRAI MECHA GIRL

ARTIST James Lin

SOFTWARE ZBrush, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, TopoGun, 3ds Max, V-Ray, Photoshop

This cool character concept took 3D artist James Lin roughly just over a month to complete in his spare time. Lin has worked intensively with a cutting-edge 3D anatomy company called Atomedge in Cape Town, South Africa for a year and a half, and has been freelancing since his student days. “For this project, I wanted to focus mainly on hard-surface sculpting in ZBrush and creating some really cool materials in Substance,” Lin tells 3D World. To sculpt fine details Lin first unwrapped the clean model, used Substance Painter to add some texture detail, exported the textures and then placed them back in ZBrush, where he used the exported height map from Substance to create sculpted detail.