ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop & Painter CREATE RETRO ART FROM 3D SCANS

Ken Coleman mixes scanned action figures and digital painting to create 80s-inspired fantasy production art

- Ken Coleman

Combining my love of customising action figures and kitbashing 3D models for concepts is exciting for me. Over the past year, I’ve developed a library of 3D scanned assets, including character heads, armour and weapons to composite scenes of my favourite characters from the world of He-Man, Skeletor and the Masters of the Universe.

The vintage toy box art, 80s iconic movie poster art and Frank Frazetta are strong influences on the type of finish I go for in my nostalgic imagery. In this workshop I’ll explain my process, from how I 3D-scan and prepare the models, before importing them into ZBrush. I’ll show you how to use basic ZBrush navigation tools such as Gizmo, Transpose, Subtools and Brushes to build a character, combining a model I previously posed and exported in Daz 3D.

The workshop will continue on the lighting and rendering of different passes of the model in KeyShot. These KeyShot renders will then be combined in Photoshop to build an image mixed with my own hand-painted backgrounds and textures and then given a final paintover in Corel Painter to get that 1980s-style oil-painted finish.

1 Preparing for the 3D scans

I prepare a figure in Daz 3D – I have a favourite for my Masters of the Universe projects called Dark Guard. I combine him with some animal and beast morphs to get the clawed hands and feet. I then export this as an object file to be used in ZBrush. I scan the various parts of the figures with my EinScan-SE 3D scanner. The larger-scale models are great for detail on the face, but the armour parts on the seven-inch scale figures are perfect for blocking in 3D.