This is my take on Sam Keith’s The Max. The Maxx is a very abstract character that changes form quite a bit from image to image, but this my culmination of the character existing in the Outback of Pangaea. I wanted this image to fall somewhere between surreal and realistic much like the character and comic do, so hopefully it achieves this.

I started this project a long long time ago and have worked on it on and off. Ihave no idea how long I ever actually spent on it but probably way too long. It’s always been my experimental piece so a lot of the stuff on here I hadn’t tried before at the time. It took me down some rabbit holes between not having a strong enough computer to complete the sculpt at one point, obsessing over color detail from all angles thinking about maybe a 3D print or animated poster which lead to wanting to attempt a real hair sim (which ended up being a deep deep rabbit hole, but I settled on a sculpt with a little paint over in the final image here). I decided I finally wanted to wrap up this project so I spent a week wrapping it up and putting together renders for this composite.

The models were started in Maya and finished in Zbrush. Textures were started in Photoshop and finished in Zbrush and Cinema 4D Body Paint and are all hand painted. Final renders we created in Maya Mental Ray and composites in Photoshop. The only minor airbrushing is applied to the hair and feathers, and a couple small composite mask bleeds around the rock.