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Now this might look like your standard corporate office in Thousand Oaks, California.
We've got the rolling hills outside here, but inside these doors at Sideshow Collectibles, they have statues Figures, life size replicas of all your favorite geek pop culture icons.
So we're gonna talk to the people that make the magic happen.
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So Sunshow looks to express itself as a Renaissance studio by combining the modern cutting edge of digital sculpting, digital painting with the classic mediums of clay sculpture, actual you know wet paint on statue.
This is the element that brings this sort of old and new world ethic together and is the heart of our presentation to the collectors.
This big boy right here is Thanos Marvel Universe, side show put it together and it's really one of their largest and most intricate pieces they have ever made.
But the other thing, it took a lot of traditional method as well as new technology, the things that you and I are easy to make him come to life.
I use ZBrush and Maya almost exclusively.
One of my biggest tools that really helped me transition from traditional sculpting into digital was my Cintiq screen that's the Wacom screen that lets you work with a pen directly on the screen.
I honestly do a lot of my sketch development work on an iPad but
Sometimes I just have to break out and get messy and in with it.
This piece we felt it wasn't working.
And this one, as well, we thought, didn't have enough there.
So I actually, I photoshopped in gray this component of the armor.
And then sent it back to him, and then we broke This line up and just adds a few more things to bring it back to that same language and I will send him the Photoshop file.
On Thanos, he's got a lot of really cool textures that are really difficult and tedious to do by hand but we can design it that way and when it comes to mold and cast we can work around those and create seam lines outside of those things and really spend that time in the design process.
To make something that really is so amazing and would be so difficult to do by hand.
His suit pattern is made up of these intersecting pyramids which is really cool.
And if you get up there, you can see that.
We really push brush work, airbrush work, sponge work and we have some techniques that we really like to use.
A lot of times we will Sponge a color on or something, and then we'll break it up with denatured alcohol, misting it carefully out of a mist bottle.
Which kinda causes the paint to crackle and separate on its own and give you a kind of organic broken up quality about it.
The amount of fidelity that we can get, the amount of detail that we can get
You can compare to what the way we used to do it in the past.
I think in the 20 plus years that we've been doing this Sideshow, I think the interesting thing about what the technology that is pretty readily available now.
I'm 51 now, so to me this is a **** magic trick at this point because it didn't exist when I started this I think that that has been both frustrating, encouraging and most certainly inspirational.
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