The Gnomon Workshop is pleased to announce the release of "Designing a Piloted Combat Mech", with Ara Kermanikian.

In this workshop Ara goes through his workflow and creative techniques for ideation, concepting and designing a mech for a film, videogame, or VR project. As visual demands continue to escalate and project timelines shrink, the concept design phase in production has shifted to using 3D tools.

Ara goes through a 3D workflow using various tools and VR to sketch, refine, model and render a piloted combat mech used for personnel insertion or extraction, the MP9 PIX mech. The workflow begins with exploration and research of the specifications and designs for the mech and obtaining an overall vision 3D sketch. After getting approval of this milestone, the mech is then divided into functional parts and broken out into projects for each part, then the entire model is combined, and further detail is added.

The model is then taken into Substance Painter and textured. Then the mech is rendered into compositions and delivered to the production teams for design review and iteration if needed. Software and techniques used by Ara include block-out sculpting in Oculus Medium, Modeling sculpting and retopology in ZBrush 2020, utilizing 3D Kitbash libraries to add detail. Finally, the model is rendered in Keyshot and color corrected and composited in Photoshop.