ZSketch: The Ear

Terry — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:46:30 +0000

I find the ear pretty tricky to model in a standard program like Maya, but in ZBrush.. wow. It’s so much easier. Being able to just push into a surface makes all the contour changes in the ear less scary. In Maya you’re playing with curves and nurbs, or trying to match up all sorts of curvy edge verticies. I would say that the ear is definitely the most challenging part of the whole body to model. For the base of this sketch I used a standard ZBrush cube, and modeled with symmetry on. Shaping the ear was done with the move brush. I pulled out the outline of the ear first. Next I took the rake brush and built up all the major curves in the ear on the flat surface.

The curves along the ear acted as a guidline for where to change the depth of the ear. They each surround a kind of pocket that is either sunken into the ear or elevated. Now that the general shape was there I just worked it with the rake tool for a few more minutes then cleaned the surface up with the polish and smooth brushes. If I had more time I would have liked to have curved the ear profile. I should mention there is poling on the ears edge because of the ZBrush cube I used. I didn’t make an adaptive skin and because of this I was left with tris on the top and bottom of the cube during the sculpt.

ZSketch: Stone Doorway

Terry — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:53:57 +0000

The Zsketch assignment for this week was a stone doorway of some sort. I wanted to play around with Shadowbox for this one. The arch was made using shadow box and the circular mask tools. To create the rocks I first cut the spaces between the shapes out using the DAM Standard brush. Next I used the inflate brush to bulge the rocks out. To cut hard angles into the rock surfaces I used the Trim Adaptive brush. I find that this works very nicely. The far side was just clipped off using the clip curve tool. Pretty simple stuff here, but lots of fun :) took about an hour in total. Go Shadowbox!

ZSketch: Eye

Terry — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:58:52 +0000

This is the first in a series of weekly posts dedicated to quick sculpts made in Zbrush. I’ll be posting one a week over the next several months. The subject is handed out by my Instructor and the goal of the assignment is to get us as students more proficient at ZBrush. Each “sketch is limited to 2 hours. If it is relevant I will discuss the techniques I’ve used to accomplish certain features of the sculpt.

Explorer Zbrush Progress

Terry — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:15:39 +0000

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.

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 :)

Zbrush Concept

Terry — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 20:08:41 +0000

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.

Crow Sculpt Final

Terry — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:38:37 +0000

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.