This week's fan art comes from our Previz and Layout Artist Chris Fendryk! Chris's inspiration for this piece comes from the iconic 1987 RoboCop directed by Paul Verhoeven.

Chris: I love industrial design, practical FX, props and miniatures and classic sci-fi movies are full of it.

From time to time I like to do a tribute to one of these and this time it’s RoboCop.

Each time I do a fan art piece I’m trying to be as true to the original as possible. With ED-209 the hardest part for me was to build him exactly the same as the practical one, so no cheating, no intersections it's all created from solid and welded pieces.

As with every 3D project for me gathering reference and studying the subject is the most crucial part of the work:

Once I’m able to understand the shapes, their meaning and design choices, I start blocking in the basic shapes making sure I'm working to real-world scale as otherwise, it might come back to bite me further along the process.

The modelling part for me is just a tedious but relaxing labour, it has to be done. Texturing/shading/lighting - it all depends on a few factors, do I want to use an IBL (Image Based Lighting), studio setup or build an entire scene? For ED-209, I tried all of the above and finally decided to go with studio lighting as I thought it would showcase the model best.

In terms of shading and textures, I tried to stay as close as I could to the original but took the privilege to crank the shaders up. Textures are procedural, made from grayscale bitmaps and adjusted entirely in 3ds Max and Vray.

For the compositing, I used Nuke as it gives me a non-destructive workflow, where I can constantly add to my 3D scene and re-render without the need of starting my comp all over again.