Terry Matthes

Say hello to “Crow Man”, my first Zbrush sculpt. On Monday we started learning Zbrush in class and it’s been a lot of fun. When I start learning a new program I usually have this insane drive to do everything the “proper” way. Zbrush has so many tools and features it’s actually a little scary. Instead of learning every little detail of the work flow I’ve decided just do use the basic features and work my way through this sculpt. I’m finding this is letting me get more work done and is interrupting my creative flow a lot less. Sure I might not be doing everything the most efficient way, but I think it’s a better way to get your feet wet.

I’d like to say that this piece has a lot of inspiration from one place or another, but to keep with my “loose” method I’ve just been sculpting in whatever pops into my brain. That’s not to say that I’m without reference though. After deciding to do a crow I compiled several images of crows and black birds. I’ve also got a few of my human anatomy references up for the skull and torso. I’ve really tried to push the geometry of the skull to extremes so that the character really has a distinct face. Birds are also related to reptiles so I’ve tried to work in a few lizard like features of offer some artistic variety. You can see this in the bony mounds around the eyes.

The reference has proved most useful to me for the fine details. It’s easy to imagine the large forms and features in your head, but as you increase the detail it becomes a lot harder to just imagine a lot of those finer elements. I’ve got a lot of snes and early console RPG references floating around in my head and those games never had this finer detail because it wasn’t technically possible. The hardest part of this sculpt for me is knowing what each brush does. There are so many and each can be manipulated to a near infinite degree.

For the majority of the sculpt I have been using 4 brushes: standard, pinch, inflate and move. At lower detail levels the move brush has been great for pulling gross forms around and altering the profile of the character. The standard brush has been used for building up the surface in places, and the pinch and inflate are awesome for popping detail out of the surface. All in all this has been pretty fun and I still have yet to paint and texture it. We will be learning how to do that this week in class. I’ll post the painted version when it’s done. If things go well I’ll take it into Maya and use mental ray to pop out a nice render :)

(http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/perspective NULL.jpg) (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/detail NULL.jpg) (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/side NULL.jpg) (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/center NULL.jpg)