Archive for January, 2009

I tried to render out my Mad Scientist design to get a sense of it as 3d forms.  He help up pretty well from what I can see, there are two areas I'm not sure of yet, being the bags under his eyes and cheek volume.  If you click on the image you can tell each side of the face doesn't really relate for those two areas.  I'm sure I'll sculpt him or model him soon though so then I'll be forced to make a decision on what the depth of those features should be.

I'm posting a small picture of it to see if he is still easily readable with all the shading, to see it larger click on the image.

Another Zsketch today.  I tried using the primitives this time, a cylinder to start with. Then used a masking technique along with the Layer brush to help build up the well defined forms easily and all at the same level.  I also used flatten and pinch to help define the angles and shapes better.  He's still lumpy, but I just ran out of patience on tweaking out the details.  I kind of like the lumpy sculpey look he has right now though.

***UPDATE***

Tiki-Topo 

I successfully retopologized the Tiki head tonight.  It wasn't as much as a pain as I was expecting.  I had hear that the retopology features in Zbrush were difficult to use but I think it depends on your approach.  I could see what the topology should be with this guy pretty easy so maybe that helped too.  If you have to do a lot of editing to your new topology while you were creating it in Zbrush I can see how it could become a frustrating experience.  If thats the case then it could be easier to start by drawing the edgeloops on the surface first as a texture perhaps.  I'll have to try that in the future.  Anyway, this does mark one more step in my quest to learn Zbrush.

So I'm finally taking the plunge and am learning Zbrush.  Zbrush is a program that aims to mimic the feel of sculpting clay in the digital realm.  The program is quite unique in the 3D world, and it's interface takes some getting used to.  I'm watching a tutorial dvd to help me out.  Introduction to Zbrush 3 from The Gnomon Workshop.  So far I'm about a quarter of the way through it and am finding it very helpful and informative.  While I was watching it I was putting the information to use on a sculpt and this is what I came up with.

For this guy I only used 4 brushes.  Standard, Move, Pinch and for fun I tried out the Slash brush and gave him that scar over his eye.  So I could get pretty far with fairly little.  I'm curious to find out what the other brushes will allow me to do.