Art Spotlight: Alice in Wonderland

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs.

Hello people, my name is Raphael Hatencia. I’m living in Brazil and I work as an art director, illustrator and 2D/3D animator for advertising agencies. Currently freelancing.

I’ve earned a course for free through a draw that Felipe Castanhari (Nostalgia Channel) advertised to study at Melies Film and Animation School. I choose ZBrush as I really wanted to get better and learn more on 3D, anatomy and character creation.

I gave my best trying to get as far as I could with all the exercises. Then the final work came and I decided to make Alice in Wonderland based on the concept by Akcho (see below). His concept really inspired me, I was searching for something Disney related and something that is challenging to me, but also reachable for a first time sculpt. I decided to do her, but not realistic, more like an action figure.

Here’s Akcho’s image that I used as a reference:

The sculpt started from a simple ZSphere on ZBrush, and from that point I went shaping the silhouette and the big parts. After I got the base mesh, I did some simple ZRemesher (ZBrush retopology tool) to get a better polycount. Then blocked the accessories, proxies and clothes.

The hardest part in my opinion was the hair. I did it 4 times, it was soo hard because it is soo detailed, curvy and dynamic. That part really made me sad because the hair was getting blooby, strange and not good at all. Then I gathered a lot of action figures from the wall and used then as reference which helped me A LOT.

To give you guys some tips, don’t give up on your sculpt (any work too). Some parts will be hard, but by polishing, and polishing and doing even more polishing, when you realize you’ll be happy with you work. Always give your best.

I am still new in 3D, but the Sketchfab plugin really made my life easier to upload my model with all texture maps, subtools (24 objects in total) and it is great to show people your model whatever angle they want to see it. Its a nice tool, it can be used to show clients how is the progress on your sculpt. I had some problems with the plugin because it only works on ZBrush 32bit version, and got some errors when uploading because my model was too heavy (Editors note: we updated the Zbrush exporter yesterday so this should work great now!). But that was good because that made me worry and learn about the model, texture without seams, to do retopoly in every subtool, learn about normal maps. I know I need to study a lot more in anatomy, topology flow in the face and a lot of other things, but i’m glad this exporter made me learn a lot and made this process a lot easier even without knowing some things in 3D.

My next sculpt will be a character from a Blizzard’s game (try to guess it) =D I have this project to make nice, beautiful girl characters from games and animations that inspires me.

If you have any question, suggestion, critics or comments send me an email: jobs@raphaelhatencia.com.br.

Thanks Raphael!

You can see more of Raphael’s work on his Sketchfab profile, on his personal website and on his Facebook page.