« Posts tagged Zbrush

Explorer Zbrush Progress

Explorer Face

Explorer Face (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/face NULL.jpg)My last post was of the concept I had painted up for my random attribute character. For those of you who missed it, I was given the task of creating an elderly prehistoric female explorer with a corrupt disposition. I was originally going to make her a fat character, but as I started to flesh things out it just didn’t make sense. If she’s walking around all the time she is probably pretty thin. The anatomy reference I’m using for the sculpt is of a much younger woman, there’s not a huge amount of naked t-posed grandmas on Google images… thank god.

Explorer Feet (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/feet NULL.jpg)This sculpt was actually started in Maya. I built a base mesh to nail the basic shapes and then just exported as an OBJ file for ZBrush.At this stage in the sculpt I’m trying to work in the basic muscle forms. A lot of her body is going to be covered up by furs and leather so I’m not going to push the detail too far. I just want enough so that when I create her clothes they will rest properly over her body. I’ve barley touched the third sub division here and I’ve only been using the “move” brush. I find that at these lower subdivisions there isn’t really a need to “sculpt” detail in. At this stage is still a process of picking and pulling vertices around. This project is due on the 9th (next Friday), so I’ll be moving along on it quite quickly now. More posts to come on Sunday :)
Explorer Hand (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/hands NULL.jpg)Explorer Torso (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/upperFront NULL.jpg)Explorer Back View (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/back NULL.jpg)

Zbrush Concept

Concept for female corrupt elderly prehistoric explorer

D&D style attribute rolling for character modeling… WTF? Yes that’s right, our latest assignment involved rolling character attributes to create out next sculpt. After our attributes were fleshed out we had to do a portrait of the character. I lucked out with the following stats.

Gender: Female
Age: 41-60
Job: Explorer
Time Period: Prehistoric
Disposition: Corrupt

Well here is the sketch I came up with after a few hours. I did some loose painting in Photshop after scanning my initial sketch in. Over the next couple of weeks I will be posting the upated sculpts of the character. The whole sculpt and paint is due on the 12th of December.
Concept for female corrupt elderly prehistoric explorer (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Terry_Explorer_V2 NULL.jpg)

Crow Sculpt Final

Hey everyone, just posting some final shots of my crow sculpt after several long evenings. The major change you’ll notice from the previous update is the feather treatment. On the old sculpt I used the snake hook tool to pull geometry out for the feathers. In the end I wasn’t happy with how this technique looked. For the final I created a few custom feather alphas. I would stamp a row of the feathers and then mask them off and pull out the next row, continuing this process until the entire chest was covered. For an initial foray into Zbrush I am happy with the results here, but I think that I need to learn more about the layers options and morph targets. The undo system seems somewhat tricky to work with and there were several occasions when it didn’t work at all. I also learned that my system can’t handle merging 3 different 13 million poly meshes. I’d chuck more RAM in, but I’m already at my boards 8GB max. I hope you all have a nice remembrance day.

Final crow - perspective (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_persp2 NULL.jpg)Final crow- close up (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_close NULL.jpg)Final crow - centered (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_center NULL.jpg)Final crow - side view (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_persp NULL.jpg)

Zbrush – Crow Man

Perspective view of sculpt

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 :)

Perspective view of sculpt (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/perspective NULL.jpg)Detail view of sculpt (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/detail NULL.jpg)Side view of sculpt (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/side NULL.jpg)Center view of sculpt (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/center NULL.jpg)

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