Neo Admiral Tsukino

This month's Sailor Moon CharacterChallengeReferences.com Character Challenge inspired me to take on a redesign of the iconic star of the series. I imagined her as a much older commander with a stocky build like Captain Avatar from Starblazers.

The style choices borrow from an Iczer 1 character album I bought back in the late 80s. It was filled with beautifully reproduced stills from the film and had vibrant colors, crisp cel shading and that characteristically rough animation line.

Process

Final Design

I decided later in the process to try a quick prop and vehicle treatment in the same style. In hindsight, everything could be pushed a lot more but I think the basic idea comes across in the final design.

Check out more art and artists at http://characterdesignreferences.com/challengers-spotlight-1/

More work in ZBrush

 ZBrush continues to be a great way to test my sculpting knowledge and an endless source of fun and discovery. This is not an easy program to master. The quirks and bugs keep me on my toes, but when I want to just explore making things, ZBrush is hard to put down.

 I learned that I was running an older version with a bug that kept the Adaptive Skin feature from working. With the update, I was able to go from ZSpheres to mesh with much better results than I did with classic skinning.

Masking for painting creases and textures has also been a great technique. I can detail the model in much the same way I would with an airbrush, washes and dry-brushing.

 I saw so many great examples of hard-surface modeling coming out of the Games program at AAU, but I never expected to get my own work beyond pencil and paper or rendering in Photoshop. Thus far, I have been able to build models based on two of my favorite childhood creations: the Double Dodger and the Dart Fighter. These fighters were part of my Convoy Battles story and had several designs. Both had an issue with too many polygons, but now I have a slightly better handle on how to reduce polys and just how many is too many.

 I also too a stab at sculpting a clothed character over a ZSphere armature. Knowing when and how to reduce polygons is still a bit of s stumbling bock for me, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.  More to come...