Introduction Hi everyone. My name is John Chen, I'm a Taiwan-born, Australia-raised artist using digital and traditional mediums. I have worked in the VFX, theme park, and collectible industries since 2010, as a generalist and digital sculptor.In the past few years, I have gradually transitioned to full-time fine art, developing my own visual style and narrative. I still help out with the occasional freelance project as a digital sculptor and concept artist.Happy Eggster Day ProjectThe happy eggster piece was a fun one-day project during some downtime; it was completed in 6 hours. It is a fan art piece based on the incredible work of H.R. Giger and his original concept for the alien facehugger egg.I’ve always wanted to sculpt something that was closer to his original design, rather than the film-accurate version. And I’ve not seen someone do this before.Giger has a huge influence on my personal art; he and Beksinski are my two favourite modern masters.ModelingI used ZBrush 2022 for sculpting and KeyShot for rendering. ZBrush is my go-to software for sculpting, I also use it as a sketching tool for my fine art oil paintings.Giger’s original concept was already pretty much fleshed out and detailed; I had studied his work for a long time, so I understand his visual language quite well and was easily able to interpret the forms, while adding my own fleshy details.Most of my work starts with a sphere. I use the Sculptris Pro function for 80% of the process. For the egg, it was just a stretched-out sphere, which I cut in half with the knife tool.Sculptris Pro was a game changer back when it was first introduced; it made sculpting without the concern for topology possible and feels more natural like traditional sculpting.It's always important for me to start with simple forms and shapes before jumping into details. I have a custom shortcut key setup in the UI to define various Sculptris resolutions, which acts like using big brushes to small brushes. I will gradually step down in size as I get more detailed.The facehugger itself is pretty basic, as I just wanted to reflect the concept, which only shows the legs and some of the tail. For the legs, I just sculpted one joint and duplicated it 3 times to form a single finger, then I duplicated each finger and posed it in position.The tricky part with the facehugger was trying to fit it into the egg. Giger’s original concept drawing didn’t quite fit the actual space, so some of the back legs are pretty broken. For the tails, I just used the curve tube brushes.For the final detailing, I often utilise the cloth dynamics in ZBrush, such as the Cloth Pull brush, which can take some practice to get subtle effects, but it's a quick way to get organic final details.I also make my own textures/alphas from 3D scanning nature. Some of these were scanned from my clay sculptures as well as a banana skin! Here is a narrated time-lapse video explaining the process for another project:For most of what I do nowadays, I am not concerned with topology for pipeline since it's mostly conceptual or for 3D printing. So I tend to use Sculptris/dynamic topology. If I need to do more advanced texturing with UVs, I will just use ZRemesher with polygroups. For this project, it was just PolyPaint with some procedural textures in KeyShot.I shared a tutorial on how to quickly retopo and UV an asset for texturing a few years ago:TexturingI used basic PolyPaint for this piece, using the Polish brush to paint the cavities and highlights with different colors and values. It's quite simple, as you can see, most of the interest comes from the sculpted forms.I also used mask by cavity and masking by occlusion and fill with a darker color to pop out the details, then go over the top again with some manual brushing, this is a traditional way of painting sculptures/model kits, there are lots of great videos on traditional model kit painting on YT, the methods can be used on digital models too. Lighting & RenderingI used KeyShot for the final rendering. I have an RTX 3070, so running the GPU mode with denoise helps to speed things up; the final beauty render was 3 minutes each. It's important to dial down the denoise settings, otherwise it will blur all the lovely highlights/details from the sculpt.Lighting was achieved with a strong overhead spot light and a front soft light using an IES profile for a more interesting fill. This type of setup is perfect for showing off a model in a chiaroscuro style. The material is a translucent plastic type; the egg and the facehugger have different adjustments to sell the translucency. Be aware that translucent materials are scale-dependent, so I typically work in the same scale across my projects and have a template lighting scene already set up, ready to go. These types of material also tend to look better with a simple lighting setup with high contrast, so I don’t recommend using HDRI with it.ConclusionMy biggest tip for aspiring artists is to keep practicing and try all mediums, even if you plan to only do digital, learning and playing with traditional mediums will help develop your artistic eye and transferable skills.The other advice is to stay away from AI references. AI can only produce filtered images. If you only train your eye on AI images, you will be missing out on the incredible organic details that nature already provides.I have two upcoming art shows at Copro Gallery in Los Angeles and Beinart gallery in Melbourne in May. If you are in the area, please come see some great art in person. All my socials and information can be found here.Thanks for having me!John Chen, ArtistInterview conducted by Emma Collins