Sunday, March 28, 2010

zBrush hey hey hey!

Apparently the most common blog post is the author apologizing over the lack of updates, so I'm not going there.


Instead I will post some stuff that I have been doing in Organic Modeling 1 where we just started fooling around with zBrush! I've played around with that application once or twice before but I've never really done any serious work in it, so if you don't count the spinning head in my showreel (which was just a detail pass on a model in maya) these are pretty much my first digital sculpts. They're still pretty rough but I'd say it's a good start.


By the way, these are all sculped out of a basic sphere, except for the last one which was a plane as you might see. I made no basemesh in maya. Speaking of which, what we have been working on in this class up until now has been to make a male human basemesh in Maya. You'll probably see something of him soon.

(click for full size)

This guy is the first one I did. I spent a lot of time on him, not only because I was learning the ropes but also because I kept refining detail and trying to tweak him towards the very specific image I started out with. In the end he ended up looking nothing like my original idea at all which was more of a fish lipped frankenstein, but that's how it always works out when you doodle.

(clicky click)

Next up is this creepy son of a bitch. This guy is an idea I've had spinning around in my head for a while, initially inspired by Hoss' horrible hallucinations at the tattoo shop in House of Leaves if I remember correctly. My last entry had a bunch of thumbnails for my creature design class. Well, the dude in the top left corner with the massive arms was originally supposed to have this face but I changed the design to make him insectoid so in that case a humanoid face like this just won't do. Speaking of the creature design monster, I will post my progress as soon as I can take some pictures. I have been putting this off because I couldn't find the charger for my camera and I've been loaded down with work lately. I promised not to make excuses so enough of that, on with the show.

(you know the drill by now)

I took a bit of a different approach to this guy. Originally I wanted to test out the subtools system by giving him a pair of big fangs and eyeballs, but aligning the objects were such a pain in the butt I decided to see go for a hard surface direction instead. This one was really fast and fun, most of my time was spent on playing around with shaders and lights. My experimentation only resulted in zBrush crashing a lot on me, and as it turned out the default metal shaders looked a lot cooler than whatever I was able to slap together.

Stay tuned for some maquettes from Creature Design!