A personal project where I wanted to push my character designs into ever weirder and quirkier directions. It started with a sketch, I doodle out dozens of little characters and when I make one I like I earmark them for future use. I thought this one had a great expression and overall design.
I then drew a few concepts around the circus theme, and settled on a design that I hoped was exciting. Then it was a case of building the world, with its rough hand-made look and mimicry of miniature photography.
The characters were created in Modo, Sculptris and Zbrush. I tend to be quite sloppy about making my meshes and I much prefer a sculpting workflow to a modelling one so I will always sculpt if I can. In this case I just made a very simple biscuit shape in Modo, and then shaped the mesh in Sculptris where it is really simple to do things like create fingers, the mouth, the teeth without having to wrangle with polygon modelling, and sculpting these shapes is both much faster and more natural.
Once the basic model was roughed out in Sculptris I bought it into Zbrush and did a “Remesh All” to created a nice new even mesh. From then on I worked in Zbrush to create all the details and the initial textures.
Those textures were then refined in Photoshop where the wood that shows underneath the paint was added in various areas by use of a mask. the same mask was then used to make sure that those scratched areas were both recessed (using a bump map) and less shiny (using a reflection/specularity map).
Once the characters were created I started setting up the scene in Modo for final rendering. Creating lighting, textures and additional background elements. I made sure to use shallow depth-of-field to mimic macro photography and spent some time working on the details and realism. The sand for example is not just a simple texture map, I created a replicator system to scatter sand grains all over the floor area to catch the light and create a more convincing texture.
