In 2012, the toy company Mattel embarked on an ambitious reboot of its popular Max Steel franchise. This endeavor included an all-new CGI animated series featuring a sleek graphic style by Canadian company Nerd Corp. Concurrently, promotional still images for the web were generated at Brain Zoo studios in Los Angeles, where I was tasked with creating and rendering characters in dynamic poses. Many of these images required exaggerated perspective effects typical of comic book art. I had to use some creative techniques to achieve a superhero comic look with the 3D Max Steel characters!

The process for each image began with a sketch drawn by art director Tony Weinstock. Using Softimage, I posed an animation rig (from the TV show) based on Tony's sketch to create a computer-generated rendering. A wide-angle lens was not enough to achieve the extreme distortion needed for the superhero look, so I essentially broke the character rigs to accomplish it. Since only the appearance from the render camera's perspective mattered, I re-sculpted the characters - stretching and compressing them as needed to achieve the exaggerated forced-perspective look. It was a lot of fun to use that particular technique, which, while unusable in animation, worked perfectly for still images.

Here are a few more examples of the hundreds of figures I posed and rendered for the Max Steel promotional campaign: