Creating a Cool Punk Version of Spider-Man in ZBrush & Blender

Introduction & Embarking on the Artistic Odyssey

Hello, everyone! My name is Samuel Martins, I'm currently 24 years old, and I'm a Brazilian 3D Character Artist. As far as I can remember, I've been "playing" with art since I was a kid. A big part of my childhood was spent drawing, watching movies, or playing video games – nothing unusual here. However, it's kind of funny how I discovered 3D art. It was in the middle of 2017 when I was listening to a very popular podcast in Brazil called NerdCast. They were talking about digital art, and two of the guests on this episode were Natália Freitas and Paul H. Paulino. I must say that I need to thank these two amazing artists because they made me fall in love with everything related to 3D.

Before listening to that podcast, working with art was something I knew was possible, but I never thought about the possibility of it becoming a career. Around that time, I also started high school. This took a lot of my time, and it was not related to art. I've never stopped studying ZBrush but needed to slow down a bit. So, even though I was already working in the 3D statue area while in high school, I like to say I started studying 3D for real in 2020.

It's such a great pleasure to be here on 80 Level with all of you. Many thanks to the 80 Level team for this kind opportunity, and also, thank you. I hope you enjoy the reading and that you can learn a thing or two. If I could, I would like to thank everyone, one by one, who has been a part of this art journey, but the list would be massive. Therefore, I want to dedicate a special thanks to Nillo Samyr and Claudio Gabriel, two amazing artists and good friends, who have been with me since my beginning in the field of 3D.

Journey into 3D Character Sculpting

One of my first contacts into the world of 3D happened through a series of videos on the WacomBrasil YouTube channel. The guest was Gilberto Magno, and it was a playlist focused on creating a real-time character bust. At that time, I was still learning English, so these videos were like treasures to me. However, even though they were in Portuguese, I was a beginner in so many aspects of the 3D world that I didn't even know the meaning of "real-time" at that time. So, I focused solely on the ZBrush modeling part, which was the aspect I understood the best from the tutorial.

Around 1 year later, I believe it was back to the beginning of 2019, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a Brazilian Discord server called WIPLandia. This server was mind-blowing for me as I realized how vast the 3D universe was. At the same time, I noticed how it was a community where everyone knew each other, at least here in Brazil, as far as I can tell. It was the first time I saw so many artists gathered in one place, and it was where I interacted with several artists for the first time, some of whom were already popular at the time. It was on this server that I made some of the friendships that I still have today.

A few months after joining this server, I started collaborating on projects with friends. I believe I've participated in more than 30 projects, involving both larger and smaller studios. On some of these, I contributed significant elements, while on others, I was just focused on creating props or specific elements for the character.

I don't recall having taken classes specifically focused on learning ZBrush, but I watched a lot of content on statue development and time-lapses of other artists working. So, it was a slow but natural process. Many things became fixed in my mind; I ended up learning a new function in one video here, another in a timelapse there, and so on. I believe the main reason I feel so comfortable working in ZBrush is that I've been using it literally since day one of my journey. This constant practice allowed me to adapt easily to different projects within ZBrush.

Spider-Punk: Concept to Reality

When I was conceptualizing the statue in my mind, my initial idea for this project was to create a "darker" version of Spider-Man, something closer to Gabriele Dell'Otto's amazing style. I totally love his interpretation of Spider-Man, and it was, for sure, one of my main references. However, it didn't take long for me to decide to go in a different direction. I chose Spider-Punk and a slightly more cartoonish style. Luckily, I could keep the essence of what I had in mind. After that, I decided that the main reference for the base of the statue would represent a scene from the comics where Spider-Punk is up against the Oscorp V.E.N.O.M. trop.

Usually, on personal projects like this one, I take the liberty to make changes to the design of the character. In this project, I decided not to follow a 100% one design of Spider-Punk but to take elements that I like from different references. Regarding the references, it's pretty common for me to try to find some new reference images while the project is already in development, not only at the beginning of it. On my PureRef board, there are included anatomy references and comic pages to help me capture the feeling of the piece and gather ideas for elements on the base, such as props, etc. Additionally, I've added a bunch of shield designs that could fit the statue. For the guitar, a friend of mine, who is a musician, suggested the model of the guitar. I loved its design and followed his idea.

My main goal in this project was to improve my anatomy skills. It's certainly one of the things that I find myself struggling with the most. Because of that, this piece has a kind of different workflow from what I'm used to. Usually, I would first create the character in a T-pose, finish props, and only after that, I'd start posing, etc. For this one, I decided to go straight to the pose stage. I wouldn't say that it is harder than working first on the T-pose, but it was for me since it's not something that I'm used to. However, I did this because I wanted to force myself to take more care of the muscles and not be lazy on this one.

To start, I used ZBrush's mannequin to pose the character and added some volume to simulate the muscles, but at this moment, I was not worried about anatomy yet. I kept working and did a general blockout of the idea of the character on the base. I wanted to feel the piece and see if it was working or not.

When I finished the first blockout, I already felt that I didn't love the pose in 3D, and with some feedback from my friend Sergio Khazov, I decided to try a different approach. Instead of making it fully inspired by the pose of Gabriele Dell'Otto's art, I added the shield so I could change the pose of the legs. Also, I made the whole base more complex, adding some extra elements to it. After that, the piece started looking like what I was searching for.

Character Sculpting & Detailing

For anatomy, Daniel Bel was certainly one of my main references, such a kind and awesome artist. I also received a lot of feedback from my friend, Sergio Khazov. He dedicated a significant amount of time to helping me with that project and showing how he thinks when working on anatomy. Since I'm not very familiar with comic anatomy, it was challenging for me, but also incredibly fun. Looking at it now after finishing, I feel that I've learned a lot. I truly believe that we can learn a great deal by stepping out of our comfort zones and applying what we learn to our usual style.

Some people have asked me how I created the jacket. Honestly, these days I would make it using Marvelous Designer and apply wind effects, just for fun and the sake of trying something different. However, I made it manually. My idea was to make the jacket appear as if the character was sliding or landing from a jump. I began with a simple blockout using a plane around the character and painted it where I thought it would be nice to have seams and some details. Almost all of it was done with a single subtool, so it's not as complex as it may seem, especially if you exclude the seam lines.

On the jeans, after completing the main folds, I added some minor ones using a folded paper texture. For me, it works really well with certain types of clothing, give it a try, you might like it a lot. Another aspect of the detailing involves the borders of the seams. These were created using common brushes like Standard and ClayBuild. The most unique one was a brush called Slash2, which is already in ZBrush but is located in internal folders. After finishing the folds and detailing, I used a large brush to make a move and tried to lay down the top part of the jacket on his back, using the body as support for the cloth. After completing this step, I added thickness to the jacket using PanelLoops. Usually, I would do this using ZModeler, but there can be some bugs when the piece has a lot of polygons, so I tried to avoid that.

This is how the jacket looked at the end of the detailing stage, just before I applied the texture to it.

The detailing of the leather part on the top of the jacket was also quite simple. I extruded it from the mesh of the jeans part and added some volumes to the borders to create better separation. I followed this by adding some damages on the borders, the process was similar to the one used for the jeans part. After that, I created some smooth memory folds using DamStandard and finished by applying a perforated leather texture.

To add the Spider logo at the back of the jacket, I began by adding a plane subtool with the logo texture. Next, I used ZBrush's Project feature to make the shape of the plane be the same as the jeans jacket. Then, I added thickness to the plane. But since the plane is initially a square and its topology goes beyond the Spider logo borders, I adjusted the areas that were outside of the logo to be inside of the jacket where they wouldn't be visible. After this, I continued detailing, like adding seam lines, the letters, and at the end added the leather texture. This process is close to what we've previously executed on the jacket.

Since this project is a statue, I needed to make a thick cloth to make it work for the printing. The additional thickness can sometimes make your piece appear a bit fake or off. However, one way to fix this is to make only the borders of the piece thinner than the rest of it. Usually, I do this using the Pinch brush after detailing the borders. This technique works well, maintaining the strength of the piece and keeping it looking nice. You can also apply this method to capes, skirts, hair, etc.

Another interesting aspect of the detailing process involves the webbing lines on his suit. I am aware that some people struggle with this when creating Spider-Man, but you can make it in various forms in ZBrush. For example, I can think of three possible ways to create this type of detailing, and you can choose the one that suits you. Of course, there might be other methods that I'm not aware of:

1. You can create it using layers and the Chisel brush with Morph Target on. When Chisel is used on a mesh with Morph Target, the sculpted lines don't overlap, allowing you to create numerous lines that still look clean. This workflow is nice because the webbing lines are on layers, enabling you to create another layer for another purpose and, if necessary, make tweaks at a lower subdivision without compromising the webbing lines. The drawback is that you'll need a high-resolution mesh, as having layers prevents changing the project's division amount, making it harder to work on the file. Also, layers are bad if you still want to tweak things related to painting because they can cause a lot of bugs.
2. Another approach is to paint the webbing lines on the polypaint. It may work better using a color that doesn't easily blend with other colors on the subtool. After finishing the drawing, use MaskByColor and proceed with an Inflate. This workflow seems to be the fastest for me, although it may not be the cleanest. However, it doesn't lock you into working with layers, making it suitable for faster jobs without requiring much polishing.
3. The workflow I chose is similar to what I saw in a ZBrush Summit, where Insomniac demonstrated how they did it for the Spider-Man game. I achieved this by adding CurveTubes and, in the end, applying a boolean. I believe this workflow gives the webbing lines a better appearance, which is why I chose to do it this way. However, the downside is that a boolean is a destructive action. To avoid losing my subdivisions or layers, I added the webbing lines to the character as a different subtool but applied the boolean only before the rendering stage. Another drawback to this workflow is that if you make changes to the muscles or tweak the character's pose, you'll need to adjust the lines by hand or delete and add them again.

Sculpting Smaller Details

The process of creating the assets for the base was, for sure, the most time-consuming thing on this project. Not because they are super complex and hard to figure out how to make, but because many of these objects have complementary details and/or are references to friends. I tried to make them feel like they belonged to someone real. For example, the amp has some logos, so it means it belongs to a brand in this Spider universe. Also, there's a wanted paper for Spider, so maybe someone added it there to make fun of him, or maybe Spider himself glued it there. I added a pizza slice as if it was being eaten by someone else just before the action happened, along with cigarettes, miniatures, scratches, and many other things. Not enough, I even did the internal part of the amp. All these details take time, but I wanted to add them to make someone think about the story when looking at the base. Not only to look at the final piece and think, "Okay, this looks nice," but to make it feel real with a possible story. And we only talked about the amp; there are plenty of other objects there that I used the same logic.

As objects themselves aren't as challenging as they may seem, I believe the amp and shield are kind of the main focus on the base, and despite being crucial elements, they are essentially simple forms, much like many other components. Unfortunately, I don't have many images documenting the base's creation process. Typically, I develop the base of my characters in a separate ZBrush file, integrating it with the advancing character file.

However, I'll attempt to recreate my process. For instance, the amp was surprisingly straightforward to create. I started with a cube, excluding the front and back faces, and extruded it to form the borders of what would eventually become the amp's walls. Upon closer inspection, you'll notice that all the details on the amp are also composed of basic shapes. Continuing the process, I added the rectangles to represent the front wood layer where the buttons would be and also added a plane to represent the logo.

An interesting technique I used here is the one used to create the perforated central part of the amp. I achieved this using the Alpha Make 3D function in ZBrush. This function allows you to add an alpha, using the image to generate a 3D object. While it does have some limitations, creativity becomes the limit in this process.

My initial idea while creating the blockout for the shield was to make it broken with a simple rectangle shape. I also wanted it to align with basic elements, as if it had been taken from a policeman by some activist individuals. One of my concepts involved adding graffiti to enhance its narrative. The development of the shield was relatively straightforward. After deciding to change its design, I collected new references on Pinterest and discovered a shape that I liked. I'm unsure if something similar exists in real life, but my intention wasn't to recreate something authentic. With this prop, I aimed to create something that looks aesthetically pleasing.

Besides being a statue and not requiring meticulous attention to topology and optimization, I like working with super-low topology. This makes it much easier to tweak the silhouette without making the piece overly wobbly or filled with artifacts. After that, I started adding details. There's nothing really special here; I added some scratches by hand and others using alphas and also incorporated some bumps on the shield.

My painting process is somewhat organic but also a bit messy. However, this is the workflow I use for all my works in ZBrush, whether characters or objects. I begin by adding the flat color and the word POLICE, achieved by overlaying an image and painting the mesh over it in ZBrush. After this initial step, I simulate Ambient Occlusion by darkening the bottom area of the piece and some corners to add depth.

Next, I focus on highlighting key areas that I want to emphasize, such as the middle of the shield. Usually, at this stage, if there are any hard corners, I add some paint to create a bevel effect with a lighter color, although this was not the case here. After that, I started adding some dirt to the shield. I like to achieve this by using random alphas in ZBrush and tweaking them to get the desired effect. For example, on this shield, I used alphas from concrete, broken stones, and paper textures. It may seem a bit messy, but it comes together well in the end.

Another thing I can point out is the importance of playing with colors and playing with black and white too! The main reason why I changed the shield to yellow after it was black for almost 90% of the project is that I noticed it was blending with a lot of other elements on the base. I wasn't sure at the beginning because I liked the black shield a lot, but after seeing it in black and white, I knew I needed to change.

Take a good look here: As you can see in this image when you examine the before version (on the left), you can see that Venom, Spider's shoes, the wood from the base, glass bottles, amp, and the shield, all these pieces merged into a single dark gray color with the black and white filter. This, at least for me, is hard to notice at first. It only popped up to my eyes when I took a screenshot of the project and sent it to Photoshop to view in black and white.

That's why I felt the need to change the color of the shield. I could have opted for a light gray or something similar, but since it's inspired by comics, I wanted to inject a bit more color into it. Additionally, after observing the effects of the black and white filter, I made Venom even darker, almost pure black with shiny parts. The wood of the base is now a bit lighter, and there are noticeable differences in the wood and buttons of the amp, as almost all of it had merged into a single tone. I wanted to make some tweaks in these areas. Spider also underwent some minor changes, but I believe they ultimately made a significant difference.

I wouldn't say that the color balance in this piece is perfect; there's always room for improvement. However, I would say it's by far better than before. This is still something I'm learning, so it's challenging for me to spot certain issues at first glance.

Rendering & Post-Production Magic

For the rendering of this project, I used Blender and made the post-processing in Photoshop.
The workflow is simple: first, I make sure to decimate (a lot) the entire project in ZBrush so that Blender can handle it. In the end, it was 37 million polygons in ZBrush, which is a lot, but Blender can handle it. Remember to keep the colors when using Decimate so we can use the painting as Vertex Color in Blender.

Still in ZBrush, after decimating, I usually merge subtools by their material. For example, if many subtools are items made from metal, I merge all of these into a single subtool and export it to Blender. I do this for a lot of different materials and usually create some variations like 'metal_01,' 'metal_02,' 'leather_01' and 'leather_02' so I can create some specific differences and avoid making it look all the same.

Now it's time to move everything to Blender. For that, I use an addon called GoB. It's really simple to use, starting by setting some things related to colors. Nothing really special, but it can save some minutes. When I'm sending the model to Blender, I also like to create a DynaMesh version of it with the character and base, all merged in a low polycount. I don't really care about the material at this point; I make it so I can start playing with the lights without taking too long to render. At this point, I just want to preview it.

Now that we have everything in Blender, I usually use a simple scene that I have with a circular background, 3-point lighting, and a bit of HDRI light. This stage usually takes some time because I'm always changing the lights' placement and colors and switching the HDRI from project to project to make it look the way I want. Sometimes, if necessary, we can even add an extra light point to give focus to something important. Nowadays, I also try to avoid making it look too flat with overly smooth shadows.

But, of course, this is the perfect time to test a lot of different things and setups. You have dedicated a lot of time to sculpting, and you can't go wrong at this stage. Missing the rendering can kill all the effort you put into the other stages before. You must make the nice things of the project pop up, show what needs to be shown, and hide what needs to be hidden.

After finishing the renders, I start tweaking the images in Photoshop. What I do here changes a lot from project to project. Sometimes, it involves simple changes in exposure/levels, while other times, I might change the color of some elements or alter backgrounds, for example. I usually like to apply special editing to the main image, the "money shot," with a background related to the character. I give a little bit of extra love to this one since it's the image that will be shown first to people when they find my artwork.

For the rest of the rendered images, I take a simpler approach to editing — just small tweaks to make them similar to each other. This usually isn't as time-consuming compared to the money-shot image.

Here are some examples of money shots/main images/cover images where I've tweaked colors and added backgrounds to make them more interesting:

On Spider-Punk, my main goal in creating the cover art was to achieve something closer to the style of the movie Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, while also incorporating elements from the comic books. Although the movie has a super cartoonish style, I aimed to create something similar.

I began by taking the rendered shot and cutting it to the proportions of a comic-book page. I already had in mind that I wanted to add the Spider-Punk logo at the top, so I left a blank space for it. I proceeded by adding some colorful borders around the character, as this is a common feature in the movie and its posters. I believe it added a lot to the character, and many people asked how I achieved the rendering effect, but it was done by hand in Photoshop.

Following this, I worked on the background. In this phase, I adjusted some tones, adding darker areas to the borders. To complement it, I added some webs; many of these were done in gray to break up the smooth color change of the background. However, I incorporated some with a kind of neon effect, aiming to emulate certain scenes from the movie.

In the next two steps, I introduced a strong chromatic aberration to the character and the base. Additionally, I added the Spider-Punk logo and typical cover art elements like pricing, volume details, etc. At this stage, I also performed some color correction because I wanted to enhance the display of more colors, achieving something closer to the vibrant palette often seen in comics.

Continuing with the presentation renders that are not the main ones, I've done something simple but I believe it worked well. This one is quite straightforward; I usually create renders with some safety borders so I can adjust the zoom level during editing. I brought the character a little closer to the borders of the image, added a subtle chromatic aberration, and made some tweaks to the levels of the characters. For the background, I simply added some borders with texture, attempting to emulate a comic book aesthetic.

In general, I present my projects with a strong focus on Instagram, as it's the platform that has provided me with most of my freelancing opportunities. I typically showcase 360º turn renders to allow viewers to see the entire piece and close-up images from Blender to highlight details that might be overlooked. Last but not least, I include ZBrush screenshots, both colored and in a style I particularly enjoy. This style showcases the character's skin in colors while leaving the rest without colors. I didn't emphasize this aspect much in Spider's case since he doesn't have exposed skin, but I made an effort to adapt it here.

Challenges & Conclusion

It's really hard for me to quantify how long this project took. I mean, from the beginning to the end, it took me around 4 months. However, I worked on the Spider project while I was also working on another project and while employed at a company, so I didn't have much time to fully focus on it. There were days when I didn't even touch this project.

When you are working on a project similar to Spider-Punk that takes around 4 months to finish, it's hard not to get discouraged when you see time flying by. Many times, you just want to finish it. I believe that the anatomy was something really time-consuming. Also, I wanted to pay a little more attention to it, since Spider-Man is pure anatomy. Spider-Punk still has some props, but Spider-Man itself is, at least for me, purely anatomy. Certainly, the character did take some considerable time, but for sure, the props and the base were the most time-consuming things in this project. Not only because there are a lot of things populating the base, but also because I wanted to make some references to closer friends. So, I spent a real amount of time designing logos or modeling something because a friend asked for something to reference them on this project. It's not something that I regret, I genuinely appreciate the idea that there's a small part of my friends in such an important project. It was a pleasure to create it for and with them.

I don't consider myself a master to give anyone any great lesson or anything like that. But if you allow me to offer friendly advice, it would be this: Be careful not to become a perfectionist when you're trying to be a detailist. They may look similar, but they are completely different things. Do your best when you're doing something, but also train yourself to know when it's time to let it go. It's something that took me a long time to understand, and I feel it was detrimental during my learning stages.

I genuinely hope you find this breakdown useful! Let me know if you have any questions; feel free to contact me via Instagram or ArtStation. Thank you!

Samuel Martins, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie