Art Spotlight: Black Scourge Singed

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

Hi everybody! My name is Cody Bunt and I’m currently working at Riot Games as a 3d Character Artist. I love many types of art, especially digital 2d and 3D. I usually spend my time playing games or going on art forums and sites to find new inspiration. The game art forums are what got me in the industry and continue to fuel my drive to become a better artist. I’m also very enthusiastic about growing as a game developer and because of this, some friends and I started a game project called Blubber Busters.

Blubber Busters has taught me to branch out and learn new skills like using a game engine and managing a team. Art-wise, I created the 3D model of one of our main characters, Rudy (the orange suited janitor), and some various enemies in our upcoming prototype. You can check our more of our development on our site & our Devlog!

Most of my professional career has been with low poly, hand-painted characters, and as a result I have grown leaps and bounds on color theory and my painting ability. The primary software I use for my characters include 3DS Max, Zbrush, 3D Coat, and Photoshop.

Black Scourge Singed

I started off by gathering reference and inspiration to drive the vision and what I think players would enjoy. The primary inspiration was a plague doctor, which suited Singed well because he already spews poison gas and looks rather sickly.

This skin was really exciting for me to work on, as I got to concept a skin for the first time and create the model. With a talented team mentoring me along the way, I grew and learned a ton on this piece. I learned a lot about design, shape language, color palettes, and how to incorporate story elements in a design. Here, I show some stages I went through in the process!

Thumbs

Color Variations

Final Concept

From here, I blocked out the model in 3DS Max and imported the model into Zbrush to begin sculpting. For models in League of Legends especially, it’s important to hold back on crazy details because the models are quite small in-game (and too much sculpt polish eats into my time for texturing.)

Final Sculpt

Once all my big shapes are in place, I bake down an AO map to begin texturing! Here I gather reference from real life and examples like the image below from our texturing guru, Pio Ravago.

Texture Reference

This is when I start doing multiple passes on my texture making sure it reads in-game, in between each pass as seen below.

In the end, I’m very pleased with how this came out and I’m glad everyone enjoyed it as well!

3D Model

Sketchfab has been a great tool for me to quickly and easily share what I’ve created. I think it can be a good educational tool for aspiring artists to study topology, textures, and how pieces are put together. I know it’s a tool that I’ll keep using for a long while!

If you’d like to follow me or check out more of my work, you can find me on Twitter, ArtStation and DeviantArt.