Trying out a neat technique.

I saw a really clever technique in a video by Ryan Kingslien and had to try it out. Instead of sculpting on top of a flat featureless basemesh I made a quick wire armature with zSpheres and then used the InsertSphere brush to add "lumps of clay" that I then stretched and deformed into the different muscles and big forms. Essentially emulating how one would work with clay in real life. It's a really obvious way to work when I think about it, and the tools have been around since zBrush 3 so I have no idea why I never throught of it before.

Here is the video I mentioned by the way:

Big ol' backlog of stuff.

All right, been too busy to post lately. Here is a bunch of stuff from the end of the semester:

The ecorche is done, which is the project that has absorbed most of my time this last month. Every muscle and bone has been modeled out, although the proportions are a bit off here and there. 

Creepy Spider dude thing. 3 hour sketch experimenting with alphas.

Urania the greek Muse of Astonomy and Philosophy. A midterm project for my Myth and Symbols class where I had the option to make a piece of art rather than write an essay. Rendered with vRay.

Base for the hair and cloth was done with zSketch.

 Fishman, another quick sketch.

 Experimenting with the Unity engine's Terrain system.

Big fat update.

I keep forgetting to update this blog, so here is a big pile of what I've been doing lately.

Skeleton is almost done. Just need to finish the feet and skull, and fix some proportions.

Elaborated more on the scar of this guy.

Experimented with some Mental Ray features. Not really noticable in this picture. Details here: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=970700&page=1&pp=15

Did a bust of Disney's Jafar.

A shitty arm study.

And experimented with some zBrush alpha features and texturing techniques.

 Which I recorded a video of, gonna start doing this for my sketches from now on.

So that skeleton in the bottom of the previous post is part of an Ecorche for my Organic Modeling class. Here is tonight's update on it. Proportions will be fixed once I'm out of the zSphere stage.

Unproductive.

This has been a distracting week. I've dropped the ball on the daily sketches.

Here is what I did today. A Combat Survival Army Tactical Rambo Knife, done 100% in zBrush to test some hard surface tools and techniques.

Also my roommate Jacob asked me if he could rig my anatomy study dude, so I retopologized him and put him in a T-pose. He wants to do a muscle rig so I tried to have the topology conform to the musculature. Time will tell if I was any successful at it. That thing has some really weird loops...

Oh, and I baked a normal and AO map and put him in Marmoset for fun. I see why everyone loves that tool, super easy to use and gives pretty nice results.

Anatomy study and silly armor.

Did an anatomy study, thinking about putting some armor on him and making him into Sandor Clegane from Song of Ice and Fire.

And here is some doodling I did to try out a workflow I saw in Eat3D's Hard Surface 2 DVD. 

Merry valentiones!

Heart, haha.

Pigman

I intended for this to only be a quick one hour mouth study because I have other homework for tomorrow. Instead I ended up spending 3-4 hours on this guys' ugly mug.

And lookit! I recorded a video:

Ugly ladies

Decided to take an acrobatic fucking pirouette out of my comfort zone and do a combination of two of the things I'm terrible at; females and full body models. I'm also trying to use the Clay brush as much as possible because I'd like to get the hang of it, most of the times I just use the Clay Buildup.

Today's and yesterday's sketches:

Bone daddy

I wanted to test out 3DCoat's voxel sculpting a bit more so I made a skull. I have a piggy bank that is cast from a medical skull so I used that as reference. It has some anatomical and proportional issues, and the underside is not finished at all, but I was sick of staring at it so I did a quick retopo and threw it into Modo to play with some more rendering stuff.

Modeled in 3DCoat. Rendered in Modo.

Hands hands hands

And some feet. A face seems to have snuck in there too...

updating again

here have a mouth

A quick nose before work

Hands when I come home

Trying out zSketch

And it sucks...

Actually, it's probably just me sucking at it, but zSpheres and zSketch is just not giving me the results I want and they are waaaay unintuitive to work with. I think I'm gonna drop zBrush for now and do it the old way. I feel I'm spending way too much time noodling around with that program and not getting shit done. Probably gonna start with the sculpting again when I do stuff like lips and noses, but for now hands seem to be just too complex to doodle in zBrush.

Here is today's hand. Shit sucks.

Grrrr fucken zBrush

As much as I like zBrush there are parts of it that really grind my gears. I haven't updated the last few days because been struggling to figure out how to use zSpheres, and i've lost two sketches to crashes now... I really need to get better at saving. After losing my second hand I decided to doodle a study of the asaro head. It looks like shit and is all wrong, but here it is.

New hand

Leaving the other hand alone for now, my computer is too shitty to do fine details like the knuckles and wrinkles.

Here is the rough start on a second hand.

And my super shitty basemesh. I see people do sketches from rough box meshes like this so I wanted to try it. Seems to work pretty well so far, but I miss Slide Edge Tool and Insert Edge Loop. :(

Hand part 3

Todays work on the hand. Put in more than 4 hours today on account of it being a weekend.