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!

What I'm working on this semester.

This semester I'm taking a class called Creature Design. The jist of that class is essentially to draft a concept for a creature and refine that, when the design has been properly polished and refined then we move to the next stage which is to sculpt maquette of the little freak in clay. The maquette will serve as reference for a 3D sculpt done in zBrush which will be the final product. 

Sounds like a lot of fun right? I'm stoked!

So far we've only done thumbnails, which are essentialy really quick and dirty sketches with little to no shading just to block in the proportions and silhouette of the design. Here are some of mine. They were more conceptual than purely visual so some of them might be hard to get. 

Homework for next week will be to take two or three of these designs and do some additional thumbs of them and flesh out the design some more with color and line if time permits.

This is my previous 3D modeling assignment. He was originally supposed to be really steampunked out but I had to do compromises because of time and budget. He was also supposed to have either a flying scooter or a weapons-carrier sidekick as a second part of the assignment, but I joined a collaborative game asset project for my final instead. I'll post the results of said project when I'm finished, it's due tomorrow so it'll be up soon. I also have a self portrait I did in the beginning of the class, but I need to take some screenshots of it first.

All righty! I won't excuse myself for never updating because it's silly and everyone does it. Instead I will post two and a half week's amount of perspective homework. Hoorah!

This was the fisheye assignment, and my latest work because blogger decided to place them in backwards order and it's a pain in the ass to edit. The initial idea was to have an Escher inspired scene where a prisoner tries to escape his cell by digging a hole in the wall, only to be surprised by the applied paradox of having dug a hole into his own cell. My friend Johan mentioned that the picture would look rather boring if all the rooms are perfectly symmetrical, so I went for a more comedic approach of four prisoners trying to escape only to end up digging into each other's cells. This enabled me to play more around with the lighting and narrative.

This was three point. I knew I wanted to do an action scene because of the dramatic characteristics of three point, and after some sketching and brainstorming I landed on a Lovecraftian scene of a team of tomb raiders disturbing an ancient evil best left alone. I put a lot of thought into the characters and the narrative here. You have the charismatic yet morally grey leader in the foreground, the dimwitted goon in the background who does all the heavy lifting and manual work, and the booksmart nerd who has unfortunately been grabbed by the tentacle because he is the only one who knows what the hell that thing is and possibly how to stop it. Also note the Elder Sign on the lid and columns and the diagram of the ruins on the floating paper in the foreground.

This is my assignment for 2 point perspective. I got hooked on Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds and wanted to illustrate a scene from it. I've always loved War of the Worlds, and this amazing album reignited my passion. There are plenty of issues in it, especially with the shading, but I simply don't have the time to make it perfect.

Next up is some Lovecraftian heebie jeebies in 3 point.

Showreel

Back in Norway, and trying to land me a summer job in 3D so I made meself a showreel to show them what I'm good for. Personally I think it's kinda weak, but I know I'm too judgemental of myself so yeyeyeye.

The quality is also horrible, and for the life of me I can't figure out why. I tried a ton of different codecs and settings but it all ended up looking like a youtube video. Possibly has something to do with the fact that I used media that had already been compressed. My video editing skills leaves more to be desired. Oh well.

Still Alive

Holy CRAPOLA! I haven't updated this baby since...February? Gah!

So let's not waste time. My last post was a rough WIP of some Figure Modeling shiz, so now I will show some actually finished work from the same class.

The first entrant is a cute little lady named Susan. My first attempt at a clay portrait, and petina at the same time.
For those not in the know, petina is a coloured wax used to colour terracotta. I think the pink colour of the clay we use is hideous, so I decided to coat her in a warm red and yellow. The results are a little shaky I'll admit, bit I learned a lot from it so the nest try will probably be a lot better.

But enough of that, here is the lady of the hour!


However, I am more proud of my second head. I named him Frank. Sadly I haven't been able to apply petina to him yet, but I should hopefully have it done by the week.

Here he is!



Let's throw in a little detail shot.


And a turnaround for good measure.


And that's all for today folks!