Mantis Master Study

I'm proud to release the most ambitious master study of my 3D career so far! This project is a master study of the character Mantis from the Instectoids series by Marco Plouffe.

I was introduced to Plouffe's work by a colleague who told me about his Twitch channel. I was excited to study his art because there were literally hundreds of hours of archived ZBrush sculpting that I could learn from. I only intended to model the leg initially... but I was having so much fun that I decided to recreate the entire character!

This was a massive learning experience. It is one thing to watch a master at work, and quite another to replicate their techniques. Throughout the process, I realized I favored a different hard surface approach from Plouffe (I like to use Booleans, whereas Plouffe does not use them at all), but it was still incredibly rewarding. While my intent was to use the same shape language for the majority of the character, I gave her my own particular spin to keep things fresh. She now sports a new color scheme, an original head concept and some cyberpunk inspired swords of my own design.

Many thanks to my fellow character artists that pushed me to grow and take on this project! And of course, to Marco for making his work so generously available.