The making of 'Furiosa'

By Fellipe Beckman

Self-taught 3D artist Fellipe Beckman shares his workflow for the fearsome Furiosa, using ZBrush and 3ds Max

In this tutorial I’ll show how was my modeling process, I will show how was the evolution to achieve a satisfactory result. I have tested different styles before finalizing the character, I had no reference of it in 3D when I decided to do and my biggest base of references was some 2D illustrations.

Blocking in ZBrush

Blocking in ZBrush is a key part of my process; I like to transfer my ideas quickly and basically from my head onto the screen, I find this saves me time and I don’t have to redo it later. I like to work with a low model even in ZBrush, for this I usually use the DynaMesh with a maximum of three subdivisions; using brushes such as Clay Buildup, Dam-Standard and Move.

Topology and UVs

While still in ZBrush, I decimated the model and brought it into 3ds Max to start creating topology, I used the tools on 3ds Max. After the topology was done, it was time to start the UVs. Again I used ZBrush to create the UVs faster results.

Texturing

I exported the objects as OBJs and sent them to Mudbox. I decided to use Mudbox as my main texturing software because of the ease of transitioning between 3ds Max and Mudbox. In Mudbox I normally paint my textures by hand.

Textures, including clothing, metal and leather

Wires and Hair

Hair, So I made separate shapes for the hair: one for the head, another for the clothes, Ornatrix V4 helped me a lot in this process, still undergoing tests, got a good result simulating wires in the clothes and a short hair.

Lights

The lighting in this scene is very simple. The lighting is a very important element that could be used to the final result of the image. I researched scenes from the movie, other artists’ work, paintings and anything that has similar colors that I wish to project. I experiment a lot to find the best way to show the final image. I just used three lights for this project.

Render

I used V-Ray to render the scene. With three lights in my scene, consisting of two main light sources; yellow being the main light and another blue light providing the rim lighting. The render took about 25 minutes in the size of 3000px, I did not do a render in passes.