Omni-Man
I was browsing Prime Video the other day when this show called Invincible caught my eye. I don’t usually watch animated shows all that much, but I saw that J. K. Simmons was in it and thought I’d give it a go. I absolutely loved him as J. Jonah Jameson in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies. I gave the first episode a try and fell in love with it. I binged it all in a single day and wanted more! So I thought why not make a realistic version of the Omni-Man character from the show, with J. K. Simmons in the suit. And here we are!
I was recovering from surgery and didn’t want to spend too much time on this, as I had a lot of other projects backed up from my stay in the hospital. So I gave myself a timeframe of two days to finish the model. I had already worked on a supersuit for another personal project last year. Though I have quite a bit of experience designing and modeling clothing, I dodn’t have as much in sculpting faces. The head was the most challenging part, doubly so because of the two different colored hair the character sports, but I am quite happy with how it came out.
One really cool thing about the show that I liked was how the title card kept getting bloodier and bloodier after each episode. Of course, the title card spelt out Invincible, but I thought it’d be nice to have one for Omni-Man as well.
Technical Details
I used MakeHuman for creating the base mesh of the character. For modeling the suit, instead of using cloth simulations this time around, to save time, I solidified the body mesh and sculpted it out. This saved a lot of simulation time while giving me complete freedom to sculpt out the body into exactly what I wanted. The gloves and boots were done similarly as well. The texturing was done completely procedurally too. This was all done in Blender. For the cape, however, I did use cloth simulation to get those nice wrinkles, but it was a lot faster than having to simulate the entire suit. The symbol was created in Adobe Illustrator, exported as a vector SVG, imported into blender and sculpted out to match the curves of the body. Texture projection was used to recreate the face of J. K. Simmons, and multiple particle systems were used to recreate the iconic Omni-Man hair. All of these were rendered separately with a transparent background.
To save even more time, the volumetric lighting was rendered in Eevee, a realtime render engine, and composited over the original render. The smoke and ember particles were created and rendered separately as well, with bokeh adding to the depth of the scene.
Here is a high resolution video of the final result. Enjoy!
