Behind the Scenes: Trumpet-Man

INTRODUCTION

Hi! My name is Osman Taheri. I’m a 26-year-old 3D artist and filmmaker from the Netherlands. I started out in Blender almost three years ago with a focus on character design. I try to do as much as I can in Blender, although for texturing, I use Substance Painter, and for baking, my go-to tool is Marmoset Toolbag. I’m always on the lookout to learn something new!

INSPIRATION

The original concept of the character was drawn by Gray Shuko.

However, after finishing the base sculpt and importing the character into Blender, I realized it lacked something. That day, I had just finished watching Whiplash (2014), so I quickly modeled a trumpet and placed it in front of him, and thought, "That's it!"

SCULPT

The big angry Trumpet Man starts in ZBrush. I generally use Blender to sculpt, but I’ve been meaning to learn ZBrush since forever, so this project served as an exercise also. I created the base sculpt and added all the details.

Then, I used a tool in ZBrush that I fell in love with: ZRemesher. If this character had detailed facial animation, I would manually retopologize him in Blender. However, in this case, the ZRemesher tool worked perfectly fine. I established some guidelines and hit the magic button.

TEXTURE & LIGHTING

I imported him into Blender, laid down the seams for UV-unwrapping, and textured the model in Substance Painter. I added some lights and performed post-processing in Blender's compositor, and hit render. Voila! Not bad, right?

At this point, he looked like a crazy guy, but also quite boring. Sure, we can see he's in a bad mood, but what is it about? That's when I decided to add the next part.

TRUMPET

I wanted to add an instrument that I could model in about 10 minutes because I wasn't sure if this was the instrument I needed. The first thing that came to mind was a trumpet, why not.

I obviously used references like any responsible 3D artist would (I swear I did) and managed to end up with this box-modeled trumpet. I left out some secondary level of detail but captured the main part of the silhouette.

I placed the trumpet in front of our friendly angry guy, and now there was a story! He's angry because he can't hold the trumpet. Alright, seriously though, he needed at least one modeled arm, so I sculpted one in ZBrush and used the same techniques with the guides and ZRemesher to obtain a retopologized arm.

HAND RIG

I took Blender's meta-rig, deleted all the bones except for the ones on the screen, and rigged the arm. I posed it, extruded some nails, and positioned it respectfully next to the trumpet.

HAIR

The last step was to give him some hair and eyebrows, for which I utilized Blender's new hair curves library. It was very easy to use and produced pretty decent results. I made adjustments to my post-processing in Blender's compositor and was ready for the final result!