BUILD AND ANIMATE A FUN-FILLED ROBOT

Expand your horizons with Julio Benavides, who reveals his workflow for creating a charming hard-surface character

- Julio Benavides

Getting acquainted with a variety of software is vital for virtually every digital artist today, as all of them have their particular strengths to help you along in every part of the creative process.

In this tutorial I'm going to explain my step-by-step workflow for creating this gorgeous robot character, including posing it and making a basic animation using Blender's physics options to help capture more stunning renders. To get all this done, I'll be using ZBrush, Maya, Substance 3D Painter and Blender. I should note that the entire process can be done using a single program if you wish, but this time I wanted to use an expanded toolset to get the result I desired.

You can try out this model for yourself by downloading it, including all the necessary rigging and textures, from the 3D World Resources, which also contains a video to follow along. The model is ready for 3D printing too, with the cuts made for you!

Finally, I want to say thanks firstly to Matt Dixon for allowing me to make this robot based on his artwork. Thanks also to Javier Lugo Hernandez for rigging the robot, and to OctaSpace, a render farm for Blender that's currently in a free beta.

01 FIND YOUR REFERENCES

This stage is always the most important part when starting a new project. In this case, my main reference was a stylised robot by the awesome concept artist and illustrator Matt Dixon, who gave me permission to recreate his artwork in 3D.

I completely understand the importance of finding the right artistic references. For this piece I took the time to search for a variety of old and new pieces of metal, car paint and more, which are all crucial visual materials for the modelling, texturing and rendering work. By using these references, you'll be able to choose the best direction to make the image you had in mind.

02 START BUILDING THE HARD-SURFACE AREAS